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.

Customer Satisfaction

I recently mentioned that I had flown on Virgin America for the first time. The experience was much better than what you typically experience on the other domestic airlines. If I had been asked to do a customer satisfaction study, I would have given them a high score. I would have also given them a high recommendation score. Both of these are a marketers and operations dream.

But why was my experience so positive? Sure they have some new toys like the interactive display at each seat, plexiglas dividers instead of curtains, and interesting mood lighting in shades of mauve and violet blue. And I give them extra points for using earth friendly method products in the lavatory. But it is a far cry from the glory days of flying. It is still a fairly stripped down experience.

The difference was the people working at Virgin America. They were happy. They smiled. They had fun. They sincerely liked their jobs! Now United has hired someone away from Disney to help improve the customer experience, but it hasn’t worked. Every United employee I encounter seems stressed and grumpy. This got me to thinking – what is the correlation between satisfied employees and satisfied customers. I think it is huge.

Customer satisfaction studies are big business. They typically measure employee related attributes such as being friendly, attentive and knowledgeable. But I recommend adding one more dimension – happy employees.