What Does Virgin Airline Need to Compensate the Customer for - Case Study Example

Marketing of Service Products a. Business letter Dear Mr. Bryce: I want to take this opportunity to thank you for raising dissatisfaction on the services offered by us on 7th December 2008. At 29 tree lane, we appreciate feedback from our customers and making it known to us on how you feel about our services is always taken positively. Six problems were identified of which five of them were associated with the food served on board. Our cookies seem to have not gone well with you that day. The served snacks, we offer additional spices as our form of advertisement. Your request on Virgin brand was not clear on flight attendant that you never wanted it spiced. May be to you it was not. Whenever you do not like something that you are served, we would appreciate if you inform one of our staffs. They would have sorted you out. Whenever we serve, customers Bryce, we take orders directly from them and we expect you to give us as much information concerning what you want. When you order for custard, it is important you ask the flight attendant ingredients, otherwise there are other delicious cookies that you would have taken instead. I agree with you that what you were served with when you requested mustard was not what any customer would expect. In fact, by the look of the picture, the procedure used to prepare it was not right. I do apologize for that. In such a serious case, we have taken action out of other customers complain and I can assure you, the Mustard we serve today is good looking and delicious. I would request you promptly report when such a thing happens to enable the management take action immediately.We also apologize for the quality of the pictures presented to you on the screen. Sometimes during the maintenance of the electronic transmitting systems, our signal providers interfere with them but alert us. It appears you came at such a time. We have however raised your concern to them so that they keep such inconveniences as low as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience we caused. We shall offer you 10 % discount of the total cost on the next two flights you take with us to enjoy our improved services. We have already put in place a system that shall ensure you raise complain whenever you are being served by visit 29 tree lane. We have put a quality management team which is on duty throughout so that whenever you have complains, they shall be addressed immediately. Sincerely yours, richard branson Richard Branson Marketing Manager b. Literature summary This literature summary is used to support the solutions that were included in the essay paper. The six problems that were identified are: Customer being served desert with tomatoes and peas Customer was served with ugly cascade which took away his taste Customer was served with too much mustard The customer was served with a very hard cookie The quality of graphics on the screen were poor The customer was served with mixture of Baaji and Mustard sauce i. Customer was served with desert and tomatoes The relationship with the customer at the time when you are offering service to him or her is very important. According to Murphy, Laczniak and Wood (2005, p 38), good relationship results to a very strong technical, economical and social ties between the stakeholders. As a result the service and transaction efficiency is increased. In airline industry, crafting and nurturing of good relationship among stakeholders includes involvement of the customer. Involvement of customer means engaging in a corporation relationship. This inevitably increases the vulnerability of business. It very important when such a delicate situation presents itself to offer and market services to customers ethically. Allocation of procedures and means through which customers can complain is also important. This paper discuses the recommendations made as a result of customer complains. Service quality defines all the problems that result from the gap of what the customer wants or what the customer is expecting and what he/she gets from the service provider (Hollye, 2007 p 5). The general agreement is that the customer is the one who defines the service quality and therefore the judgment of the service quality is always based from the customer’s perspective. The extent to which the quality of the service meets or exceeds the expectations of the customer is what counts on quality of the service. Once the quality of the service has been determined and defined, it is important, though not easy to measure the service (Kaiser 2001, p.192). Among the dimensions that may be used to measure the quality of the services are assurance, responsiveness, empathy, reliability and tangibility. When the customer was served with desert with tomatoes therefore is identified as major quality dissatisfaction by the customer. The measurement of the extent to which the customer was not satisfied is expressed by the letter he/she wrote. Though the service was offered by the flight attendant, this was not the person who prepared the desert. The cateress in charge of the cookies ought to have known the quality of the desert that was being served. Gronroos (2010, p. 327) observed that whenever there is a process is involved in fulfilling a customer’s expectation, the outcome has an impact on the way the customer perceives the quality of service offered to him/her. In this case though the flight attendant and everyone else on board did the best to provide the service, the one who should have oversaw the cooking and preparation of the desert let them down. The thing to do here is to confront the cateress who was in charge of the cookie and if he/she was ignorant or poorly managed this section, the best thing is to sack him/her. Gronroos further observes that to the customer, it is the outcome that matters. The customer would not be interested on the process through which the desert was prepared to the where it was presented to him, but what matters is the end of it all. Is it presented right, and is it well cooked. The customer raises issue on the timing at which the desert was presented. It sets a bad image on Virgin since the flight attendant is not aware of the time at which the dessert should be served. However, the fact that it was presented to him before the main meal was served does not mean anyone would be taken action against. Some people take dessert as snacks not necessarily at the end of the meal or the start. If the customer would be very annoyed about this, he/she should have requested for alternative time that he/she should be served. Different customers perceive the same service differently. Accommodating every customers specific needs and interest is the best thing to do in this case. It is also recommended that the customer has the say on the kind of food to be served while on board. Bill Bryce is unsatisfied in most cases the services that were provided to him when the flight attendant had not consulted him. As a result he ended up being dissatisfied by almost all the services that were provided to him. Concerning compensation, Virgin airline need not compensation on this issue, Virgin airline need to compensate the customer for being served desert at the wrong time and being served with the wrong ingredients. Compensation would have been valid only at the time when the customer was on board, but since complain is happening when the customer is through with the services he/she needs not to be compensated. However it is important that we encourage the customer to use our services again at slightly subsidized cost. This will encourage him to be loyal to the company. ii. Customer was served with ugly cascade which took away his taste Another problem that was identified is customer complain that he had been served with sour gel with clear oil on top in the name of custard. While custards are made using egg, sugar and milk, the customer does not understand why it was sour. It looked awful and killed the customer’s appetite when he saw it. The likely cause of this problem was that either the chef used the wrong ingredients to prepare it or the cookie was out of date. This means the cateress who is in charge of the department of preparation of food to be taken would be held responsible. Otherwise, the system might have stayed with the custard for too long which made it to end up being stale. If this is the case then the flight attendants should be held accountable. They should not serve stale food to the customers. The problem arises as a result of the virgin system in which the customer had no control over and given the fact that he had another almost similar complain, then he need to be compensated for this. The system should identify this as one area where trust between the customer and virgin airline breaks. Murphy, Laczniak & Wood (2005, p.48) observes that good relationship between the customer and the service offering firm cannot occur in a vacuum. There are virtual an elements of integrity that goes together with any service that is being offered. Whether the food was stale or had wrong ingredient shows that there are some elements that lacks either by the chef or the flight attendant. Other elements that show lack of integrity include lack of coherence, dishonesty and lack of self awareness. Integrity acts as super virtual that holds all these elements together. Fairness is another thing that comes with integrity. Murphy, Lazniak and wood (2009) further observes that if the relationship between the customer and the service provider is unfair, the deal between the two will be unbiased. In fact, there is very little chance of the deal succeeding. Marketing variables should always aim to strengthen fairness if the business is to last. Customers tend to engage in services where whatever they get is fair to their health and whatever they get is given in a fair manner. Customers should not be seen as source of problem thus organizations and corporation should focus on retention, satisfaction and loyalty to the customer (Singh 2006, p. 1). In this kind of situations when the organization serves something that the customer does not like, the organization should collect the mistake by apologizing to the customer and compensating him for the dissatisfaction that came as a result of their mishandling him. The customer attitude towards the service provide depends majorly on the kind of satisfaction or the emotional reaction between what the customer anticipated and what they receive concerning the fulfillment of some needs. Singh (2006) further observes that customer loyalty is as a result of the organization creating a benefit so that the customers will increase or maintain their purchase of products or services from the organization. Customer loyalty is deeply held in the commitment to re-patronize or to re-buy the service or product that consistently when such a time comes in future even if the marketing efforts and the situational influences have the potential to cause a switching behavior (Jones & Farquhar 2007, p. 169). Customer will not be loyal to the organization if the quality of the services provided are not suiting the needs which are intended for. If the food served would satisfies the customer, the customer loyalty would have been created. A loyal customer would even market the organization by advocating for it without incentive. Customer retention means creating a long-term relationship with the customer. This kind of commitment ensures a continued reason to do business with the organization. iii. Customer was served with too much mustard The customer raised a third issue concerning service of food. This time he was served with must mustard. While mustard is supposed to be served in small quantities, the chef had put a lot of it for the customer. As the old saying goes, too much of something is poison. It is inappropriate for a customer to be served with too much mustard since this does not give a good impression about the preparation of the food. The potatoes were also badly prepared. According to the complaining customer, the potato masher had only broken them but not mashed. Here we have two problem, too much mustard and poor method of cooking food. This problem again emerges from the catering department. The chef who prepared this for the customer deliberately cooked the potatoes inappropriately and provided the wrong amount of mustard to the customer. Why this was done can best be explained by the cateress. The cateress should be held responsible for this mistake. Such mistakes definitely tarnish the name of the organization. Regarding compensation, though the customer was wronged, he had the option of asking for replacement or dissatisfaction immediately. Too much mustard when served means this might have been one major mistake by the chef. No way would anyone take such a cookie and therefore making an instant complain would have been the most honorable thing for the customer to do. Complaining late on such a matter, with no convincing evidence cannot help the customer to be compensated. However, this complain should be taken seriously by the management to ensure such a thing does not happen with the catering department. The cateress should always check every edible item that is packed to be offered to customers on board. A system that involves a group of people to deliver services to the customer should be as interactive as possible (Gronroos 2011 p. 331). Such a system provides different types of support systems to the interactive system. From the customer eyes, all these are hidden beyond visibility. It is very unlikely that the customers would be able to know what is happening behind the line and therefore most of the times they do not realize the usefulness of quality of the service that is offered at that place. The technical quality is often supported behind the line of visibility. A good technical quality which is founded and supported by the process from the head office would be destroyed by bad functioning qualities created by the interactive process in the line of visibility to the customers. In this case, the flight attendants should be provided with the good technical support from the cateress to be able to achieve their objectives of offering the best service to the customers on board. Service quality depends on the support from the management and physical support from the support system. Service provider has to know how to develop customer based results. iv. The customer was served with a very hard cookie The fourth complain that the customer had was concerning a very hard cookie he was given. He thought that the cookie was sweet by the look of it only to be disappointed when he bit it. How hard a cookie is depends on the ingredients used to prepare it and the method used to prepare it. This is not a major problem of on for the customer because it only affected one customer only. It means the customer was not satisfied simply because he does not like hard cookies. As a solution to this, catering department should offer a variety of cookies so that the customer has the choice of which cookie he/she should take. Some customers like hard cookies others like very soft cookies while others like moderate cookies. Raising the alarm at the plain would not have made a significant. Where cases arise that it is not known at the beginning of provision of the service exactly what the customer wants, the firm has to adjust its ways and its resources accordingly in order to suit the customer’s needs (Gronroos 1998, p.325). In flight services where food is prepared before board and served to customers on board, the adjustment required is to offer a variety of foods so that the customer has a variety of choice. Gaining deep insight on the behavior of the visitor or the customer is very important stage in establishing a good relationship with the customer. Customer behavior should be represented by cross channel analysis of all customer data, which allows a deep insight to customer’s motivations and prevalence. Every interaction with the customer should be made to be an opportunity to understand more of the customer. From customers point of view in the process consumption, the solution to their problems are by combining a set of resources needed to create a good customer-perceived quality service and value (Wirtz & Mattila 2004, p.155). The firm should aim to having competencies in order to acquire and develop the resources needed and be able to implement and manage the service process in such a way that creates values to the customer. A system for overseeing all these is needed to enhance integration of various types of resources and management of the service processes. v. The quality of graphics on the screen were poor The fifth issue that the customer raised was concerning poor signal qualities observed on the flight while he was on board. He complains that he never comprehended what his favorite star was doing due to poor signals. It is unfortunate that when the electronic device is installed to provide entertainment for the customers on board, it causes anxiety and dissatisfaction to the customer. The cause of this problem is poor quality of digital versatile disc or poor quality of the DVD player. The flight attendants ought to have checked on the quality of the disc and the disc reader prior to the departure of the airline to ensure that it was appropriate and would serve the customer satisfactorily. Films are additional free services offered to the customer on board to brand the industry. Its presences are not mandatory and therefore customers cannot be paid due to failure of these services. However it is important that whenever these services are available, they perform their functions appropriately. The aim of having additional services is to promote good reputation on the industry. Wong & Musa (2011, p. 3420) observes that new lucrative in aviation industry draws new competition on the market and therefore they should be presented in a way that they bring satisfaction to the customer. Air lines that fully implement their lucrative enjoy high perception which means good reputation. Reputation is tarnished easily if the services failure occurs which results to customer dissatisfaction. Negative experiences by customers could create negative word-of-mouth by the customers and therefore it is very important that airlines avoid any negative perception on the level of service quality they offer to their customers. vi. The customer was served with mixture of Baaji and Mustard sauce The sixth issue that the customer raised concerned the dissatisfaction on the kind the way cookies were served to him. He was served with a mixture of Baaji custard and Mustard sauce. The customer never liked this mixture since it reminded him of bad memories. The problem was that whoever served him was not supposed to mix the two. The solution to this problem would be to understand what the customer wants before we engage him/her to the kind of service we want to offer him/her. If the flight attendant had known the interest of the customer, his likes and dislikes it would have been very easy to serve the required item. It is also important not to mix the food items since doing so may cause dissatisfaction to the customer. Ensuring that the customer is satisfied by whatever we serve to him or she in this case is dependent on whether we had consulted knew the likes and dislikes he/she has. Jensen (2009, p. 50) observes that the appropriateness of food, beverages and other products offered to the customer on board matters on whether the customer will be interested to take the flight next time. He identifies that the service aspects involving personal attention and consistency in service needs skilled people and the organizations should use their skills and monetary resources to strengthen it. Conclusion As the customer perception continue to shift towards a more commoditized view of the world, companies like aviation industries which reach large number of customers should exercise high levels of insights into individual customer’s preferences and behaviors (Sorce, P 2002). A learning relationship should be established so that what customers see shall be lasting competitive advantage. Food served to the customers while on board should be well prepared and served. Discussing with the customer on what he/she wishes to take while on board enhances the attendants to serve the customers satisfactorily. Wide variety of items should be provided, so that the customer can choose what he/she wants which can drastically increase the efficiency of the services to the customer. Support systems like videos that offer luxury to the customer on board should be fully functioning. Communication channels through which customers can air their dissatisfaction should be availed and customers made aware of them. Good and functional communication between the customer and service provide eliminate most of the problems that service providers might neglect. References Gronroos, C 1998, ‘Marketing services: the case of a missing product’, Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, vol 13, no. 4-5, pp. 322-338. Jensen, RL 2009, ‘Delivering excellent service quality in low cost aviation’, A process perspective on the passenger market, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 23-77. Jones, H & Farquhar, JD 2007 ‘Putting it right: service failure and customer loyalty in UK banks’, The International Journal Of Bank Marketing, vol. 11 no.25, 161-172. 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Wong, KM & Musa, G 2011, ‘Branding satisfaction in the airline industry: A comparative study of Malaysia Airline and Air Asia’, African Journal of Business management, vol. 5, no. 8, pp. 3410-3423. Wirtz, J & Mattila, AS 2004, ‘Consumer responses to compensation, speed of recovery and apology after a service failure’, International Journal of Service Industry Management, vol 2, no. 15, 150-166. Read More