Customer Satisfaction Conceptual Model

Afsheen Chitnis
Member

Posted 13-Dec-2004 08:32 AM
Dear Graham

Can you suggest a conceptual model for customer satisfaction in the airline industry?

Thank You

Afsheen Chitnis

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 14-Dec-2004 12:37 AM
Chitnis

A tough one this. Most of the existing customer satisfaction studies caried out by airlines have a strong airline focus and not a very strong customer focus. And they generally do not look at the potentially more important factor of customer disatisfaction at all!

Having been involved in developing a worldwide Airline Customer Satisfaction Study for PricewaterhouseCoopers in the late 90s, I strongly recommend that you approach this in three phases.

The first is to survey different segments of airline customers to identify what is important to them over the different stages of the end-to-end customer experience. This will allow you to identify which touchpoints are critical to the customers and just how critical they are relative to each other. This applies just as much to touchpoints that drive disatisfaction as those that drive satisfaction.

It will also allow you to identify the emotions customers associate with different touchpoints. Although this is a difficult area, you do need to understand which emotions are evoked by particular touchpoints and how they can be influenced.

The next is to use your knowledge of what is interesting for customers to survey them to find out how well the airline does for each of the customer-defined critical touchpoints against its competitors. At PwC we got passengers who had just taken a flight to complete a survey within a week of having taken the flight. This avoided problems with the customer's experience being blended into their general opinion of flying.

The third is to develop linkages between customer satisfaction/disatisfaction, retention, customer commitment, loyalty and profitability. Research suggests that for most customers, the link between satisfaction and retention is strongest. However, retained customers are still available to competitors. But for some customers, there will be a stronger link between commitment and loyalty. Loyal customers are unavialable to competitors. The links between satisfaction and profitability are generally weak and indirect.

This is obviously an enormous area to cover in a short posting.

Look at the Swedish & American Customer Satisfaction barometer work for a good introduction to how satisfaction links to business success.

Look at Richard Oliver's book on customer satisfaction—Satisfaction: A Behavioral Perspective on the Consumer, McGraw Hill, 1997—for the definitive customer satisfaction conceptual models. And at Hofmeyr & Rice's excellent book on customer commitment—Commitment-led Marketing: The Story of the Conversion Model, John Wiley, 2000—for the definitive commitment thinking.

Graham Hill
Independent Management Consultant
(Ex Aviation CRM Consultant)