Airlines call flight ban a 'European mess'

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http://160.96.186.100/lib/pdf/2010/Apr/ST2003.pdf

Customer Satisfaction in the Banking industry: A comparative Study of Ghana & Spain

How to make product development projects more successful by integrating Kano’s model of customer satisfaction into quality function deployment

A Real Customer Service Experience of myself as a stranded Airline Customer

http://www.customersoulutions.com/?p=383

DOT’s Tweaking of Traveler Protections

By Scott McCartney

The new airline customer-service rules issued Wednesday by the Department of Transportation may sound like a lot of change but really boil down to small modifications of existing rules and codifying some measures that airlines have already adopted.
Perhaps the most impactful change for travelers is including international airlines in the tarmac-delay rule. We’ve seen some serious delays on international airlines – passengers stuck onboard grounded planes for 10 hours or so. U.S. airlines – faced with huge fines if they didn’t act – have largely learned to avoid long onboard delays. Now foreign airlines will have to do more to make sure they have gates and contingency plans for dealing with travel disruptions. They are subject to fines if passengers are left onboard a delayed flight for more than four hours.
The new rule also expands the number of airports where it would be in effect. Previously flights that were stranded at small airports were exempt. Now smaller airports, including airports to which flights divert, are included for domestic and international airlines.
Travelers should have the choice – wait it out or give up, go home or get on another flight, if you can.
Perhaps the least impactful new rule is the one getting a lot of headline attention – forcing airlines to refund baggage fees if bags get lost. The key here is that fees don’t get refunded if bags are simply late. You only get your $25 back if the airline never delivers the bag to you, not if it didn’t get on your flight or got sent to San Diego instead of San Antonio.
It can take many weeks for an airline to officially declare a bag “lost,’’ never to be found, and many more to actually get compensated for your losses. You may be out several hundred or even several thousand dollars (never check valuables!) in clothing and belongings, and you face a torturous process of trying to prove the value of lost goods to an airline with receipts. Airlines depreciate the value of goods lost and unilaterally decide what to pay you. The $25 bag fee is the least of your worries by the time you get through with the airline.
Bumping up compensation to involuntarily bumped passengers should further curb airline overbooking and make travel more reliable. It may also sweeten the offers airlines make to get volunteers to give up their seats.
The fee disclosure regulations probably won’t have much impact, however. By now, most travelers know most airlines charge baggage fees. Southwest Airlines advertising probably does more to educate the public on that than any regulation. Now airlines will have to tell you clearly that there may be additional fees like baggage, and make it easier to find the fees.
It can be difficult to click around an airline Web site to find actual baggage charges, often buried in sections with baggage rules. A clear menu would be preferable – if you want fries with your hamburger, the price of fries is on the same menu. Imagine if a restaurant just posted a notice that fries were an additional fee and you had to go somewhere else to find the actual price.
The DOT didn’t require airlines to include their customer-service promises in the legal contract of tickets, called the “contract of carriage.’’ That would have given travelers a way to take airlines to court when they didn’t live up to their promises.
The new rules do require airlines to let consumers either hold a reservation for 24 hours without a fare change or get a full refund within 24 hours. That’s actually something most airlines already do – most big carriers pledged to do that 10 years ago when they pre-empted passenger-rights legislation in Congress by voluntarily offering customer service protections.
It’s unfortunate the airline industry doesn’t seem to be able to step up on its own and treat customers more fairly, straighten out its service problems and be more open about its pricing. The DOT is trying to protect passengers, and airlines do respond when pushed by the government. Perhaps if the industry had more leadership and was more proactive instead of reactive, it wouldn’t have to come to that.

How to Turn Customers into Brand Ambassadors

 After I talked about the future of “search” in my previous article, lets now look at what a brand should do to win in the new “search” paradigm.

It starts with listening, a simple act in the digital world the importance of which is yet to be fully understood or appreciated. Listening to conversations about your brand or product or service offers multiple opportunities. If people are speaking well of you, you’ve an opportunity to convert them to your brand ambassadors. If they are speaking ill of you, thank them for helping identify an opportunity for you to grow and to resolve an issue in a way that turns around their perceptions and experience.
Don’t listen and you end up missing out on both opportunities above and you should be prepared to face a potential backlash from dissatisfied customers. For example, Vishal Rao, a frustrated customer of MakeMyTrip ended up creating a new site RuinedMyTrip.com to share his horrifying experience and it is prominent on searches for the company. For more on this, check out this Mint story.
Tools such as Google Alerts and TweetDeck do a great job of helping a brand listen to conversations about it. Once a brand has laid the foundation to continuously listen, it can embrace some or all of the opportunities of “social search,” some of which are below:
–Be present on relevant Social Media: Given that search results increasingly throw out more social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, SlideShare, and others, being present on these channels opens up new opportunities to be found by customers on search engines. Take a minute to search for your name on Google and observe the results. This article ‘Google will force all B2B companies to Tweet’ will help you further understand the importance of Twitter.
–Turn your satisfied customers into brand ambassadors: Given that potential customers want to know about your product or service through the people who’ve already used it, the opportunity of leveraging your existing customers to bring in more customers is unmatched. But how? There are numerous ways to do it.
Recently, LinkedIn launched a new feature called its “Company Page,” where any company can list its products or services. There is no reason you should not request your satisfied customers to share their feedback about you. At Digital Vidya, we’ve been continuously making the most of our LinkedIn Company Page to build credibility and generate more business. Similarly, you can request recommendations be placed on your LinkedIn profile.
Today, Twitter is one of the favorite platforms for consumers to share their opinions. The question is whether you can encourage and inspire your satisfied customers to share their views about you. You can then use the stream of positive tweets about your brand as testimony to attract new customers. For examples, 24hoursloot.com has integrated a Twitter stream into their website in the form of “true testimonials from real people” to boost conversion rates for every campaign, which drives traffic to their Web site.
Believe me, it’s also worth spending time in identifying and requesting some of your customers to blog about you. Let me share two examples from our social media workshops: Social Media Workshops in India: The one I endorse and Social Media and the ‘GURUs’
In addition to blogging, it doesn’t cost you anything to request your satisfied customers write about their experience about your brand on popular review sites such as MouthShut.com. Here is an example of another business for which we requested experts to review our products at JavaRanch, one of the most popular Java discussion forums.
Likewise, depending upon your industry, you will have enough avenues to realize the opportunity of word of mouth. Please remember, if you are listening, you may discover a number of satisfied customers, who otherwise gets missed.
While it’s important to acknowledge and encourage your delighted customers, it’s even more critical to take care of your dissatisfied customers. In the world of social media, nothing works better than making a public apology and taking responsibility of your mistakes. By resolving the concerns of your customers in public, you are likely to strengthen your relationship with your satisfied customers in addition to turning your frustrated customers into brand ambassadors.
CafeCoffeeDay has an interesting case in which they smartly recovered from a short-lived crisis by appropriately responding to their customers in a timely way. By publicly dealing with the situation, as MakeMyTrip is also doing, you show that you are doing your best to improve customer satisfaction.
I will be happy to answer any questions you may have on the tools and case studies discussed. Moreover, I invite you to share relevant personal experiences in the Comments.

Pradeep Chopra is chief executive of Digital Vidya, a leading Indian digital marketing training company. He also runs a digital marketing community on Facebook.  He’s reachable on LinkedIn and on Twitter @pradeepchopra. You can read his full mentor bio here.



http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/04/27/chief-mentor-how-to-turn-customers-into-brand-ambassadors/

Changi Airport unveils a raft of customer service initiatives

Published: 28/09/10
Source: ©The Moodie Report

By Mary Jane Pittilla, Brands Editor

http://www.moodiereport.com/document.php?c_id=1178&doc_id=25373

FACT SHEETS ON CHANGI AIRPORT’S CUSTOMER CENTRIC INITIATIVES

included are:

Initiatives 
1. SWIFT – Service Workforce Instant Feedback Transformation
2. VOTES – Valuing Our Tenants’ Excellent Service
3. Workforce Survey
4. New Tourist Refund Scheme
5. iChangi (mobile application and interactive kiosk)
6. Care@Changi
7. CHANGI Identity
8. Speedpost@Changi
9. Fast Tray Return System
10. Workforce Skills Qualifications and Service Literacy Test
11. Passenger Reconciliation System
12. Taxi Management System and Carpark Information System


http://www.airports.org/aci/ACIAPAC/File/News%20Release%20Docs/News_Members/The%20Changi%20Experience%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf

CHARACTERISTICS OF SERVICES

For those of you who wonder how to elaborate 'CHARACTERISTICS OF SERVICES' for term test, Ben

The services have unique characteristics which make them different from that of goods. The most common characteristics of services are:

• Intangibility.
• Inseparability.
• Perish ability.
• Variability

for detailed explanations, refer to http://www.citeman.com/274-characteristics-of-services/#ixzz17v8vF3DT

http://www.citeman.com/274-characteristics-of-services/

Service Quality and the AuQS 2000 Quality Management System

By Asst. Prof. Teay Shawyun Ph.D.

http://www.qa.au.edu/page2/auqs2000/ServiceQuality.pdf

Service Quality Gap Model

,

The gap model (also known as the "5 gaps model") of service quality is an important customer-satisfaction framework. In "A conceptual model of service quality and its implications for future research" (The Journal of Marketing, 1985), A. Parasuraman, VA Zeitham and LL Berry identify five major gaps that face organizations seeking to meet customer's expectations of the customer experience.

The five gaps that organizations should measure, manage and minimize:

• Gap 1 is the distance between what customers expect and what managers think they expect - Clearly survey research is a key way to narrow this gap.
• Gap 2 is between management perception and the actual specification of the customer experience - Managers need to make sure the organization is defining the level of service they believe is needed.
• Gap 3 is from the experience specification to the delivery of the experience - Managers need to audit the customer experience that their organization currently delivers in order to make sure it lives up to the spec.
• Gap 4 is the gap between the delivery of the customer experience and what is communicated to customers - All too often organizations exaggerate what will be provided to customers, or discuss the best case rather than the likely case, raising customer expectations and harming customer perceptions.
• Finally, Gap 5 is the gap between a customer's perception of the experience and the customer's expectation of the service - Customers' expectations have been shaped by word of mouth, their personal needs and their own past experiences. Routine transactional surveys after delivering the customer experience are important for an organization to measure customer perceptions of service.

http://blog.vovici.com/blog/bid/18271/Service-Quality-Gap-Model