Based on a highly differentiated service concept and competitive price point, JetBlue entered the American airline services industry in 1988 and quickly gained customers and began accumulating industry awards. The concept of having first class amenities in coach cabins, and have direct routes to America’s most popular cities caught on. In 2003 JetBlue was named the Best US Airline by the upscale magazine Conde Naste Traveler in a reader poll. In 2005 JetBlue received the FAA Diamond Certificate of Excellence Award, and later than year introduced fleet-wide in-flight entertainment to all 36 channels of DIRECTV.
In 2007 JetBlue was recognized by the industry guide OAG as being the best low cost/no frills airline. Despite all of these awards however the company suffered a major set-back in February, 2007 when due to scheduling and optimization of routes, a JetBlue flight sat for five hours on the tarmac at New York’s La Guardia Airport (Wade, 2007). Enraged, the passengers were calling 911 from the plane to get off, and yet JetBlue refused to move out of the take-off line due to an ice storm (Waite, 2007). February 14, 2007 will always be remembered as the day JetBlue started an airline passenger revolution, as since that day much legislation has been passed to protect flyer’s rights (Wade, 2007) (Waite, 2007).
JetBlue has worked to recover from this customer service and PR disaster, putting into place state-of-the-art analytics applications that measure customer sentiment and satisfaction. JetBlue has extensively modified its service chain and service operations as a result, with the aim of significantly increasing customer satisfaction over the long-term (Jeppsen, 2010).. From that low point in February, 2007 to today, JetBlue has worked diligently to turn the service experience into a core differentiator of their company (Wade, 2007).
Along the way the airline has hit plenty of turbulence as it has strived to overcome the systemic problems that contributed to the incidents in February, 2007 as well. The intent of this paper is to analyze how JetBlue used service marketing, supported by analytics and customer service measurement methodologies SERVQUAL to increase their customer satisfaction effectiveness as other airlines have in the past(Parasuraman, Zeithaml, Berry, 1991).
JetBlue now realizes that it is the customer experience, not necessarily the operational focus of how it services and returns planes for flights from its operations teams, which matters most (Braff, DeVine, 2009). Also being cognizant of customer expectations in the context of service marketing and choosing to cancel the February 14th, 2007 flights from New York’s La Guardia Airport would have averted a PR disaster. The cost trad0offs of customer experience and satisfaction must be weighed against the hard realities of running a capital intensive, expensive to operate business. Yet JetBlue would have saved themselves millions of dollars in lost reputation if they had made that choice over attempting to get the stranded flight out in the middle of an ice storm, leaving a plane full of passengers stranded on the tarmac for hours.
This paper analyzes how JetBlue has been able to redefine and grow the positive aspects of their brand by using customer satisfaction measures of performance to better align crew members with customers’ perceptions (Waite, 2007). The lessons learned from this analysis are also being learned by airlines globally, some faster than others. The case of United Airlines and their refusal to reimburse a musician for a broken guitar, which lead to him producing a YouTube video that promptly netted over 55 million hits in two weeks and became the leading viral marketing story of 2009, illustrate some airlines still don’t get it. United is a case in point and their planes having all the atmosphere of an Internal Revenue Service office during audit time – quite different than a Southwest flight for example. These examples of United versus Southwest are provided to show just how acute and dramatic differences are in how the customer experience is the marketing.
At the center of JetBlue’s re-emergence as a dominant discount carrier in the US has been their improved approaches to managing, fulfilling and exceeding customer expectations. JetBlue’s organizational culture shifted from being purely focused on organizational effectiveness to one of customer centricity following the events of February, 2007. This shift in culture however did not come easily as the focus in the organization had been consistently on operations efficiency, dictated by the backgrounds of the senior managers and executives in charge of airline operations (Wade, 2007).
The metrics and key performance indicators within JetBlue forced efficiency and cost savings and placed high value on full flights always flying. This in turn led to a mindset of customers being second, and their expectations being third and their satisfaction being last. The incident of February 14, 2007 then was not just an aberration; it was the culmination of a mindset of seeing customers as an interruption to the efficiencies operation of the airline. Even though the cabin amenities were exceptional and well recognized in the industry and travel trade press, the soul of the company was beginning to slip away in the name of pure efficiency and operational excellence.
What JetBlue did after the February 14, 2007 wake-up call was to create an entirely different series of customer service and marketing strategies to stress customer experience over just operational efficiency. As JetBlue, like many airlines is a highly metric-driven culture, the use of key performance indicators (KPIs) and measures of performance is critical for making change last in the organization. Monitoring, measuring and modifying strategies as a result of the use of SERVQUAL became the foundation of JetBlue’s focus on improving customer relationships, meeting and exceeding expectations, and also creating more effective marketing strategies over time (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, Berry, 1991). This was a unique step for any airline to undertake as the cultures are highly tuned to operating and process efficiency over customer satisfaction and in many airline company cultures, these two aspects of their business can pull their operations strategies in opposite directions.
To lead the revolution towards customer experience, JetBlue first concentrated on a balanced Scorecard (BSC) approach to making sure there was a balance of operational and customer-centric metrics in place. Second, the company integrated the two dominant methodologies used extensively in services industries, SERVQUAL into their core set of performance metrics. This in turn led to the development of the best measures of variation in expectations versus actual performance delivered JetBlue had ever seen, even when they had occasionally used customer satisfaction surveys in the past. The basis of the SERVQUAL methodology is to measure the difference or variation in the median levels of expectations versus actual performance of an organization. There have at last count been over 800 studies of SERVQUAL and many of them multi-year in scope(Parasuraman, Zeithaml, Berry, 1988). These studies when taken together over the decades in which they were completed provide an accurate glimpse into how trust is generated as part of the broader marketing strategies, programs and operations strategies of service-based businesses (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, Berry, 1985). An essential aspect of the methodology is that the measurement must also be completed during the actual service delivery process, and to this end JetBlue began offering, in randomized seats, SERVQUAL-based surveys to passengers during and at the end of flights. This provided an exceptional level of insights not attainable through traditional customer satisfaction surveys e-mailed or mailed out after the fact. The interaction between the service provider and client is more accurately measured when done as immediately as possible to the actual service event (Parasuraman et al.). The SERVQUAL metric was originally created with the five generic dimensions of service quality for customers’ expectations to be met(Parasuraman, Zeithaml, Berry, 1991). These five dimensions are briefly discussed here in the context of how JetBlue used them to better manage expectations and improve the experience of flying with them.
The first of the five dimensions of SERVQUAL is assurance (Crosby, Evans, Cowles,1990) (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, Berry, 1988). This is the dimension that concentrates on those areas of a company’s culture that are the most difficult to change and as a result include the areas of knowledge transfer, training, new employee development and customer satisfaction programs to increase overall SERVQUAL scores. Studies have also indicated that this dimension of SERVQUAL is critically important as a determinant of trust within selling, service and service recovery scenarios (Anderson, Baggett, Widener, 2009). Assurance is a critical determinant of trust and integrity throughout a long-term relationship with a customer as well. Trust in fact is the catalyst of customer loyalty and assurance is key to making that happen. For JetBlue they had drastically reduced the trust in their brand due to the February 14th, 2007 event but also the many aberrations in customer service that had happened previously (Wade, 2007). The assurance components of SERVQUAL, when quantified through actual survey work, showed JetBlue that despite their passion for quantifying and measuring operational performance, they were failing often in the area of assurances to customers.
Overbooking flights, not telling customers of gate changes until literally the last minute, not paying for hotels when the last fight out of a city was cancelled for those on return legs of their itineraries all contributed to the JetBlue brand taking a beating in the market. This one component also showed very clearly that the JetBlue brand was its marketing; the two were inseparable. The JetBlue customer experience as even more of a predictor of the company’s growth than any amount spent on marketing, promotion, discounts, special fares or even bundled vacation programs (Zeithaml, Berry, Parasuraman, 1988). JetBlue learned the hard way that this one aspect of the SERVQUAL model, assurance, has a direct bearing on their ability to be trusted for the long-term and for their marketing programs and promises of performance to have any credibility at all. Assurance is the catalyst of credibility and trust, and through the surveys that JetBlue completed both in-flight and at landing showed this as the case (Ku, Fan, 2009). The second factor in the SERVQUAL methodology is empathy, or the ability of an organization to create, maintain and grow processes that create a culture that places a high value on a caring, individualized environment where customer needs are critically important. Southwest Airlines had previous to 2007 been using SERVQUAL on short-haul regional flights to test out if their unique value proposition of being an attractive alternative to driving was working. Purely from an economic standpoint as gas prices have risen their value proposition has been solidified (Crosby, Evans, Cowles,1990). Yet the aspect of empathy is an area where Southwest seeks to hire the best possible attendants to create this culture both in their large operations teams and also onboard their flights. JetBlue on the other hand had created a culture that stressed efficiency and pure operational excellence over empathy and the result eventually came out in their decisions made to strand passengers on the tarmac of five hours on Valentines’ Day, 2007. What is fascinating about the SERVQUAL methodology is that each component can accurately determine the level of commitment to a given value that may be strong underneath the branding and marketing veneer of a company, waiting for the right set of circumstances to expose it over time (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, Berry, 1991). This is exactly what happened with JetBlue on this dimension. Their initial empathy scores were negative, almost off the gird of analysis used for SERVQUAL. The veneer of empathy for customers as defined in their branding and marketing literature had become a hypocrisy waiting to happen; and on February 14, 2007 it did. In subsequent analysis of in-flight and post-flight experiences, customers mentioned that empathy was above the neutral line of the analysis, a marked improvement during 2008 and 2009 research periods the company completed. Empathy and assurance were the two areas of SERVQUAL analysis where JetBlue found the greatest room for improvement overall. To compensate for the exceptional low scores in the areas of empathy and assurance, JetBlue also aggressive pursued social media marketing strategies to overcome this weakness. The airline did this for two strategic purposes. First to get its crew members and attendants in touch with customers’ real-time expectations, experiences, compliments and complaints. This proved to be exceptionally effective from the standpoint of getting the internal culture focused on listening to customers instead of just shoving them through the airline company’s operational systems and queues to generate sales. Web 2.0 technologies (O’Reilly, 2006) had the strong effect on the company’s ability to listen and appreciate how to better serve customers. The Web 2.0 technologies are based on the design principles and tenets that are shown in Appendix A, Web 2.0 Meme Map. JetBlue soon found that striking a balance between operational efficiency and the quest for operational excellence could be balanced with empathy and the ability to design processes to deliver assurance as well. Earning trust, over time, became a higher priority than just hitting the highest levels of efficiency over time. This transformation was also made possible through the use of social networking platforms and applications (Bernoff, Li, 2008). A representative analysis of social networking applications is shown in Appendix B, Social Networking Applications.
It is ironic that JetBlue adopted social media marketing to change their reputation and they have been changed by it. The lessons learned from their social media marketing strategies built around Facebook, Twitter and other platforms has been to further underscore how critically important SERVQUAL is as a measurement of their performance over time on the customer experience dimension. In effect the social media marketing strategy had transformed JetBlue more than it changed any aspect of their customer base. The company began to realize that when empathy and assurance are measured there is a corresponding impact on financial performance over time. Today JetBlue has over 1 million followers on Twitter and millions of fans across all their social media marketing programs. The irony of social media marketing changing the company more than influencing its customers is not list on industry analysts or senior management.
The third factor of SERVQUAL is reliability, which is by definition the ability of a service organization to deliver consistent performance over time (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, Berry, 1985).
JetBlue has been able to accomplish this through their strong culture of operational excellence and performance. This aspect of SERVQUAL did excellently compare to other aspects that were related to creating and sustaining trust. On this measure JetBlue excelled as their organizational structure and analytics are geared towards business process consistency and performance. The value of reliability is so engrained into the company’s culture that they readily excelled at it, often at the expense of their customers, which is what led to the moment of truth of February 14, 2007.
The fourth factor in the SERVQUAL measurement methodology is responsiveness. On this dimension of SERVQUAL, JetBlue initially found that their strong operational performance focus helped them from an on-time departure standpoint (Waite, 2007). Yet the focus on responsiveness from an operational efficiency standpoint was coming at the expense of empathy, assurance of individuals care and a focus on making the experience being part of the broader marketing experience. This fourth factor of responsiveness in conjunction with the tangible experiences of JetBlue as a brand, which is the fifth factor in the SERVQUAL methodology which includes all branding, communication materials, equipment, physical facilities, and most importantly, the customer service and flight personnel. Please see Figure 1: SERVQUAL Conceptual Model for an overview of the entire set of factors.
Source: (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, Berry, 1985)
For JetBlue to recover from customer experience disaster of February 14th, 2007 and the more systemic challenges the company has had in becoming more customer-centric, senior management turned to SERVQUAL to evaluate overall performance across five key dimensions. When the transformation of JetBlue from a marketing standpoint is analyzed using this framework their many initiatives, strategies and programs all interrelate and show how critical it is for any company to aspire to eh trust of its customers. JetBlue successfully did this over time, ironically being transformed through the customer listening process they hoped would transform their customers. In the end, JetBlue learned hwo to be more customer-centered by taking on the challenge of transforming their brand, and the most critical aspect of their marketing, which is the customer experience they deliver.
This is Preview only. If you need the solution of this assignment, please send us email with the complete assignment title: ProfessorKamranA@gmail.com
