Travel

Airline Passenger Satisfaction Programs

Airlines have need for tracking customer satisfaction as never before. In the tight economic environment where most airlines find themselves, they need to trim costs wherever there is fat, but at the same time be careful not to trim muscle. In this analogy, it is the customer who defines the difference between fat and muscle. Thus, during times like these, the need to track customer satisfaction closely becomes even more apparent!

• Airlines, unlike many other industries, have an excellent environment for tracking customer satisfaction First they have the opportunity-the flight! Customers are "constrained" by the aircraft, have amply opportunity to complete a brief survey, and are seated, with readily available writing surface. The flight is an excellent opportunity to capture customer satisfaction.
• Secondly, some critical information is already available-the date, the flight, and by other airline databases, the crew. This information can easily be supplied in advance as part of the survey packet identification process, or added by crew.
• Thirdly, staff is available for the minimal effort required for distribution of the surveys to the passengers.

It is reasonably rare for situations that require customer satisfaction tracking to have these critical ingredients so well in place.

Sterling has experience in conducting in-flight customer satisfaction tracking research with the airline industry. In some cases, the survey has been a brief postcard size questionnaire with as few as six or eight questions. In this case it is convenient that the reverse side of the card can function as a business reply mail piece. Passengers who didn't get around to completing the survey on the plane can still mail it back.

Other questionnaires, longer in format, can be quite diagnostic in nature and provide valuable feedback on a wide range of operational details. In some questionnaires, Sterling provides a block of space for hot topics. The contents of this block change as issues change.

Sterling Research uses the Xerox Flash Forms printing process for questionnaires. This allows customization of forms on the fly; thus each "flight kit" is pre-coded for the specific flight where it is distributed. Since the master envelope is also identified in this manner, it is easy to make sure that the right kit goes to each location. The Flash Forms technology also means that each questionnaire bears the same and proper identification and none are lost in the maelstrom of busy airports.

Sterling completes the customer feedback process with an excellent on-line reporting system called Report-IT! Using Report-IT! airlines can access their results as quickly as they are scanned to the database. Further, individual responses can be quickly and easily identified for follow-up and service recovery if appropriate. Secondly because Report-IT! provides for a variety of ways to look at the data, not only can individual flights be examined, but flights and crews can be rank-ordered on any item on the survey so that those really doing an excellent job can be singled out for praise, and further utilized to teach success to those equally easily identified as lower performers.