Abstract
Airline services should be passenger-focused to be sustainable. In this study, we redesign an in-flight service process using a service blueprint while incorporating direct customer perceptions of service experiences. To incorporate these, we apply topic modeling to 64,706 passenger-written online reviews of airline services. Passenger experiences of in-flight services are the sum of experiences from service encounters in all the subsequent steps and we assume that their direct perceptions of their experiences are faithfully contained in the online reviews. Topics extracted from the reviews can be regarded as service encounters based strongly on passenger experiences. Then, the service encounters are reorganized within the framework of a service blueprint. The results show that the complexity, a number of service steps, decreases by 38% compared to the benchmark service blueprint. However, the divergence, a latitude of service steps, should increase for a couple of service encounters. Moreover, we quantitatively analyze the divergence using the probability of word frequency statistically distributed across topics. The in-flight service using the proposed design could be sustainable with respect to customer-focused service while considering direct customer experiences in real-time.
Highlights
Through the liberalization of air transport service agreements, the airline industry has grown with the arrival of new entries, which comprise various types of air transport service providers, including low-cost carriers [1]
The current latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) results show that word sets associated with specific behaviors for service delivery and word sets associated with customer assessments of service competence appear together within the relevant topics
We redesigned a customer-focused in-flight service blueprint (SB) while understanding customer perceptions of the service through the application of topic modeling based on 64,706 passenger-authored online reviews for airline services
Summary
Through the liberalization of air transport service agreements, the airline industry has grown with the arrival of new entries, which comprise various types of air transport service providers, including low-cost carriers [1]. Industry growth and increased competition have expedited the diversification of customers’ needs by expanding multiple layers of air traffic demands, and service customization, which makes it possible to address each customer’s needs, is a common strategy for achieving competitive advantages [2,3,4]. Since passengers must remain in the space for most of the flight, while being exposed to the service, the cabin is very important for service experience perception [10]. Customization in relation to intangible factors is not flexible as airlines must follow national and international air transport regulations, the chief aim of which is safety
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