Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Airline Satisfaction

I recently had the pleasure of visiting beautiful Glastonbury, CT. It is not an easy place to get to from the west coast. It required a flight to Chicago, then a connection to Hartford. So round trip, I had 4 separate flights.

On this particular trip, I flew United. It is obvious that they are putting renewed emphasis on customer service. While I am happy to see that the flight attendants are a bit friendlier than in the past, I haven’t seen many other changes. I’m hoping this is a harbinger of things to come. Their renewed effort is also clear since I now get an invitation to complete a customer satisfaction survey after every trip.

I am always excited to see research play a role in any customer initiatives. However, I am wondering about their approach. When I entered the survey, they showed me the four legs of my trip. Rather than randomly assign me a leg to evaluate, they let me pick one. This approach is probably good from a customer perspective. After all, if I only had issues with one leg, but I was asked about a different one, I would be frustrated that they did not let me tell them about the flight with issues. By letting the customer pick the leg to evaluate, results probably skew toward those flights that caused some dissatisfaction. Likewise, for customers who had no issues, they are more likely to pick the leg where they had the best experience. This means United doesn’t really get a representative score card. I suspect they know that. This customer satisfaction survey is probably more about giving the customer a chance to be heard. Secondarily, it gives United a report on problem areas.