Service Failure - Essay Example

There are several horror stories of service failures in almost every industry, from problematic products to inefficient service employees. The service failure I will share is not something I experienced first-hand. However, because I believe the actions of the service provider can fully illustrate the point of this week’s topic I have chosen to share my friend’s experience instead of mine. In the middle of this year, my friend who lives in the Philippines had booked local flights for eight of her relatives with one of the budget airline companies in the region.

She was motivated to purchase the tickets early since they were cheaper due to the airline’s buy-now, fly-later promotion. The sale date was July 2013 and the relatives were supposed to fly out in January of 2014. Last month, my friend’s sister who had also bought a ticket during the promotional period reported to her that she and her husband needed to re-schedule their flight. Apparently, the airline had cancelled all morning flights for that route. Affected passengers were given the chance to move their trips to the afternoon or another day for free.

After a couple of weeks, my friend herself received an email from the airline informing her that they were completely getting rid of that route altogether. There was no mention of a refund for any affected passengers. My friend and her husband have written the airline asking for a refund on all eight tickets she had bought for her family. They are still waiting for a response. Service failure is manifested in this situation because of several points. First, the airline company failed to inform their customers of the change in their flight schedule when they cancelled morning flights.

According to my friend, there was no notice made in the media. Second, the company again made the mistake of cancelling the route altogether without due notice to the public. Third, it did not provide for any compensation for the inconvenience their decision caused customers who had still to use their tickets as in the case of my friend’s family. Lastly, their response time to the affected passengers is very slow. All of these factors make their service distasteful. The service airline companies provide can be considered intangible.

This is because the purpose of all the nice things an airline company does is so the customer gets satisfaction, which is something that cannot be touched, seen or heard. Since satisfaction is intangible, a service provider must make sure there are physical aspects to show customers the company can indeed deliver “customer satisfaction.” The service provider in question has this tag line on their website: “Real low fares. Great experience”. (Air Asia, n.d.) While they do have low fares, my friend and other passengers in the same situation cannot agree with the second phrase.

The ordinary person does not get on a plane just on a whim. Purpose and cost of the plane ticket do not matter. It is the schedule that is important because the date a person chooses to fly is always made with so many considerations. As such, moving a flight date can never be a “great experience”. Also, in this case, their communication material about the changes was not inappropriate. The passengers were not informed in advance through mail, the company website or in the newspapers and as such were unable to make other arrangements.

As mentioned earlier, passengers choose a specific flight schedule for a reason so finding out late that they have to change their flights or these have been cancelled presents so many problems to the customer. A study on managing consumers’ emotions during service recovery attempts came to the conclusion that service failure engages a customer’s emotion so that when a customer does not see a sufficient level of effort on the part of the service provider in handling the failure, the latter is termed uncaring and the former feels negative emotions.

(Mccoll-Kennedy & Sparks, 2003) Ultimately, this is where the airline’s service failed. There was no show of thoughtfulness on the part of the airline company before and after flights were cancelled. As a result, they have disgruntled customers asking for refunds. Unfamiliarity of the Filipino culture may have been a reason for this service failure as the airline company is from and managed by Malaysians. They may have not anticipated how emotional Filipinos are when, like in this example, a chance to have a reunion has now become unfeasible.

Yet another influence may have been limited funding for sufficient notification avenues. Based on their ticket sales, the company may have thought that the route was not popular enough so it was okay to just cancel flights without putting a notice in major newspapers. Certainly, neither customers nor providers want to deal with a defective product or poor service. Because both parties will benefit from the outcome, it is paramount to ensure that the quality of service delivered is unquestionable.

This way the providers earn customer loyalty and continuous profit while the customers enjoy the satisfaction of knowing their money had been well spent. References: Air Asia. (n.d.) Retrieved from http://www.airasia.com/ph/en/home.page Mccoll-Kennedy, J. & Sparks, B. (February 2003). Application of Fairness Theory to Service Failures and Service Recovery. Journal of Service Research, 5 (3). Retrieved from http://jsr.sagepub.com/content/5/3/251.abstract#cited-by