Importance Of Service Quality In The Airline Industry

Introduction

Over the years, the focus on service quality has been increasing. It has become a very valuable source of differentiator for companies who operate in a highly competitive industry. Companies such as Apple have utilized superior service quality to increase not just their sales but their brand equity as well. The success of Apple Stores, which earns the highest revenue per square foot in the retail industry, has been largely attribute to superior service quality with their initiatives such as Apple Genius and live demo of their products.
The airline industry is among the most competitive industries in the world. The most successful airlines have high focus on providing superior service quality, which has lead to them building a

Service quality cannot be measured by evaluating outcomes of service process only, but we have to also consider service production process, such as employee training and customer-employee interaction.
One method to measure service quality is SERVQUAL, developed by Parasumaran et al in 1985. According to this model, quality is a comparison between expectations and performance. Another model, presented by Gronroos in 1982, defined two types of service quality: technical and functional. Technical quality is what a customer is receiving from a service and functional quality is the manner in which the service is delivered. Functional quality and technical quality contributes towards image quality, which is the corporate image.
According to Johnson, service quality depends on the quality of inputs, quality of processes and quality of

Earlier the focus was on flight frequency, load factors and aircraft type, now the focus has shifted towards customer satisfaction and loyalty. While service quality is an intangible in its nature, it is easily felt by the passengers and is therefore used by passengers for judging the overall quality of an airline.
Few critical dimensions of service quality are as follows-
• Ticket Purchase- The airline industry has moved away from call centers/airport purchase based system to a largely online purchase system. During the earlier trend of ticket purchase, the ticket purchase process was very essential for service quality as it formed the key aspect of service experience, called “moment of truth”. With the advent of the online system, the importance of this step has reduced due to negligible human intervention and a largely technology-enabled process.
• Pre-Flight Services- In the recent times, there has been a large focus on providing and improving pre-flight services. Examples of such services include email or text message reminders, parking facilities, transportation services