Airline Service with a Smile Still Matters

Air travel in the 21st century is an ordeal: endless security lines, constant delays, cramped seats, and shrinking or disappearing food service. Recent research shows, however, that an airline still can make the flying public happy by offering well-trained, friendly faces because nothing matters to travelers as much as the way they are treated.

So says a study into customer satisfaction with the U.S. domestic air industry by Shannon Anderson, associate professor of management, and Sally Widener, assistant professor of management—both at Rice’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management—and Lisa Klein Pearo, assistant professor of marketing at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration. “We were interested in seeing how different customer characteristics affected the weight or importance the passenger gave to different attributes within airline industry service,” Anderson explains.

The researchers examined whether the importance of an airline’s travel schedule, on-time reliability, or service quality influenced passengers’ subsequent satisfaction with the company’s service, and they found that the importance of various aspects of airline travel for customer satisfaction differs depending on the person’s age, gender, income, and travel experience. Men, for example, place greater importance on the quality of an airline’s food, while women care more about how they’re treated by the employees. Older customers—the only group to show a significant interest in the plane’s operational performance—proved to be more satisfied than younger people, while customers in first class expressed lower levels of satisfaction—a situation that, the researchers suspect, reflects a higher level of expectations that aren’t being met.

Across the board, however, employee interactions were almost four times more important to airline customers than any other factor. “Satisfaction with the service depends disproportionately on performance,” Anderson says. That finding is particularly important for airlines that claim superb performance in a specific service, since overall customer satisfaction will depend on whether the airline delivers on the claim. “With few exceptions,” Anderson says, “most airlines don’t seem to appreciate that their employees can offer a distinctive, comparative advantage over their competition. A properly trained employee can make what otherwise seems like a commodity service into a personalized, positive experience for every customer.”

—Pam Sheridan