How Jet Delivers - On The Ground And In The Air

CUSTOMER FOCUS

Mohit Sen, 28, a textile trader, has been a frequent flier on Jet Airways, ever since he took over the reins of the family business five years ago. He calls it a smarter alternative to the domestic carrier. More so in the last couple of years. Without elaborating, he says that flying Jet today is a much better experience compared to a couple of years ago. Though he can't pinpoint any particular reason, he's a satisfied customer.

There are obviously many more like Sen. From small beginnings in 1993, today the airline carries around 17,000 passengers daily on a fleet of 36 aircraft - nine Boeing 737s and seven ATR 52-500s - to 44 destinations around India. This growth has happened because service quality, which began as a part of Jet's mission statement, is now being reinforced at every stage.

Jet Airways' basic credo is simple: There is nothing like perfection in delivering service. It can always be improved. Therefore, nothing is small enough. And this message comes through right from the top. Says Ernest Collett, general manager, service quality and customer relations: "Quality for Jet Airways is Naresh Goyal. The chairman's interest makes a difference." For instance, if Goyal finds anything wrong - a cushion missing, some spillage, a headcloth missing, or finger-prints on the overhead storage space - he is not chary about giving his feedback directly. Quality, for Jet Airways, means quality for both internal and external customers.

The story of Collett's recruitment as Jet's quality chief itself underlines this point. Three years ago, when Goyal, the travel agent-turned-airline entrepreneur, asked Collett, then working with South African Airways, to take a look at quality on Jet Airways and join him, Collett demurred.

After an initial survey, he found nothing wrong with the quality of service and told Goyal that he could put his money to better use. Goyal's retort was that there will always be things that need improvement. What appears okay on the surface may not be so when one looks closer. That convinced Collett. And for past three years, the airline has been on a mission to redefine the quality standards it had set for itself.

Says Saroj Datta, executive director of Jet, "The current quality standards, their measurement and procedures are a byproduct of our mission statement. It is the quality of our service that distinguishes us from other airlines." Adds Collett: "Our sole objective is customer satisfaction and to be one step ahead to provide the best. We want to be perceived as a world class airline." Though it would have been enough for the airline to merely try and be better than its main rival Indian Airlines, it consciously benchmarks itself with the best in the world - KLM, Emirates and Singapore Airlines, among others.

QUALITY PROCESSES

At the core of the Jet quality focus are standards backed by quality processes: there are norms laid out for all areas of customer experience, from reservations to check-in, departure, in-flight services, arrival and post-flight. Whenever there is negative customer feedback, or there are in-house service detractors, the feedback is mapped against set process to check where the non-compliance happened.

This is then remedied by communication and training where needed. If the processes are complied with and there is still customer dissatisfaction, or where standards are loose, cross-functional teams are set up to tighten them and redraw the processes.

Underpinning the whole system is the foolproof way in which Jet monitors quality. It happens at three levels: formal customer feedback through service monitor questionnaires; internal feedback and critical comments from detractors; direct quality audits at periodic intervals.

Jet Airways has a system in place for auditing service quality on a continuous basis. For example, at Mumbai airport, service quality is physically verified from 4.30 am to 10 pm by two people working shifts.

Their job is to move from X-rays to passenger queues and other areas of customer interaction to check for problem areas and take correctives. The overall service quality is audited at the six metro airports every quarter, and twice a year at airports with four flights a day. For the remaining airports, audits are done on an ad hoc basis. Plans are afoot to increase the frequency of audits to iron out quality discrepancies between various airports.

The audits tend to be detailed. For example, when check-in counters are audited, the audit checks at least 26 parameters for compliance with the standard - starting with cleanliness, to the display of the Jet logo and signage, and going to staff grooming, greeting passengers by name, and the total time taken to process passengers waiting in a queue.

Offering quality in a service area is always tough, for there is no time to inspect and check. In a manufacturing company, the separation between the production and distribution functions provides a way to weed out defective units. "As a result, a manufacturer can deliver defect-free products even when in-the-factory reliability is less than 100 per cent. In a service industry, quality is subjective and that has to be improved upon constantly. A number of different departments have to mesh together and service delivery has to live up to perceived customer expectations," says a corporate consultant. And don't forget that an airline only flies passengers, while the rest of the countless functions are outsourced.

Collett says the service quality wing steps in to figure out problem areas before they become major customer irritants. "We take the role of a critical customer. It's a case of challenging the organisation and the environment. Quality cannot be checked in a service industry. The departments have to know the standards," he adds.

Flawless quality all the time is also a near impossibility in the service industry. There is always a gap between what a customer may expect and what can be delivered. The trick, though, is to keep the gap as narrow as possible, so that the gap between customer perception and the company's perception about what needs to be delivered is constantly narrowed.

GAP ANALYSIS

Three years ago, the quality department adopted a gap analysis model to analyse quality of service issues at different levels. With two vice-presidents overseeing the exercise, about five departments came under the quality/service purview. These included airport service, inflight service, catering, marketing and sales.

The gap analysis is done from the points of view of both the customer (the user) and the airline (the provider). It takes into account both the internal customer (people within the organisation) and the external customer (the traveller). With role playing exercises, Jet identified the expectations gap that exists between customer and provider, and those that could crop up in future. This helped the quality department chart out the service quality specifications to aid service delivery.

The largest gap - not expectedly - lies between customer expectations and management perceptions about these expectations. The key to narrowing this gap lies in reducing four others: the gap between management perceptions of customer expectations and service quality specifications (gap 2), the difference between these specifications and actual service delivery (gap 3), the effective communication of this service delivery to customers (gap 4), and the difference between what customers expect and what they perceive they are getting (gap 5).

To make the job simpler, Jet decided to tackle the entire service cycle both on the ground and in-flight. The ground rules meant involving people at every stage, right from the time a traveller enters the airport to fly Jet till he disembarks. It includes reservations and tele check-in, city side ticketing, baggage screening, queue management and right down to the arrival lounge. The logic was simple: If you focused on small things, the big things came right.

Just how small the issues could get was evident from how Jet decided that fingerprints should not be seen on the cabin overhead storage flap. There weren't really any complaints about this, but Jet's quality cell, consisting of 11 people, decided it could do without shabby imprints. So today, when the 10 cleaners get on board after every flight turnaround, they have one more job to do. Jet claims to be the only Indian carrier that "deepcleans" the cabins after every flight.

How Jet Improves Quality

HOW THE CUSHIONS DID THE JOB: It's always a pain finding storage space for hand-baggage in smaller planes such as the 737s that Jet flies. The design of the plane leaves little scope for improvement. But when faced with regular feedback on customer irritation about this, the Jet people decided that something needed to be done - if the problem could not be solved, it could at least be made manageable.

At the brainstorming sessions that followed, it was discovered that a lot of storage space was pre-empted by cushions, blankets, first-aid kits, oxygen-masks - all must-haves on board. The point to ponder was: could this problem be converted into an opportunity?

Apparently, the answer was yes. Around the same time, the airline was also considering ways to improve its business class service. The brainstorming sessions indicated that the storage problem in economy class could be reduced by a little redistribution. The engineering department was asked to reallocate the safety items closer to the front and tail-end of the plane. Then, the pillows for business class were placed on the seats - reducing their need to keep asking for pillows. Case solved.

WATER! WATER! If you have been on any domestic flight, you will find harried air-hostesses rushing up and down carrying glasses of water to thirsty passengers. Both before and after meals. Others are busy refilling water cups that come with the food trays. Since air-hostesses come with only two hands and a heart, water demands were considered to have a slightly disruptive effect on other aspects of service.

Solution: more water at first go. The problem was rectified on most flights last year when the 120ml mineral water goblet served in the tray was replaced by a 200ml pet bottle. In-flight officials say that since then water calls, which carry a high nuisance value, have been whittled down to half.

These small things count when you see it in the context of heightening competition in the airline industry. There is every chance that the privatisation of Indian Airlines could bring in a foreign player. Then there are Sahara, Royal Airways, North Star Aviation and Crown Air, which could slow down Jet's growth rate. Sahara is getting more aggressive with its frequent flyer scheme and increased services. Even Indian Airlines has become more efficient. Consider this. Its 737s fly 2,900 hours a day today, up from 1,600 hours a day in 1995.

In the same period, the A-320s have upped flying time from 2,300 hours earlier to 3,100 hours today. Little wonder then that Jet is trying to leverage its brand equity hinged on quality and on-time performance. While the Jet Airways' business model talks about the requisites for safe flying - a modern generation aircraft, young fleet (average age: three years), wider coverage of India - it also harps on upgradation and innovation of products and services and understanding customer needs. In recent months, it has focused on two things - the visible aspect of in-flight service and the quality of its products, its purchasing habits and quality of consumables served on board. All this to ensure a defect-free product.

Priced at the premium end, Jet is currently undercut on fares by Indian Airlines.This means Jet has to offer value in other areas to make up for the price disadvantage.

FOOD ABOVE ALL

Food was one area the airline decided it could not afford to lose out on. To provide a first-class feel, the business traveller on Jet has been getting plated service for quite some time now. This means that instead of the earlier prepackaged meal, which had the main course and desert on the tray, he now gets his two (breakfast) to three courses (lunch and dinner) dressed to perfection in Noritake crockery. Until six months ago, Jet used crockery sourced from a local manufacturer.

"The Indian customer has travelled a lot and is familiar with foreign airlines," says Collett. This meant providing international standards on a domestic airline. But customer satisfaction also means attending to customers on the ground. Thus, Jet has adopted a system of having a floor walker, now redesignated queue manager, to keep an eye on how customers are served at the airport.

The floor walker monitors the entire gamut of services ranging from attitude of staff, appearance of counters and assistance with baggage and queue management. Employees say that it is an organisational self-assessment. "It is done to see how we perceive ourselves," says a ground staffer.

This was one lesson learnt from discreet observation at the counters. A passenger was late in catching his flight. When he reached the security gate huffing and puffing, a polite Jet Airways official informed him that he had missed the flight. Now, airline officials are taught to smile and be polite to passengers.

In this case, however, a smile was inappropriate since a passenger missing his flight would be irritated by excessive smiling when the need was for empathetic listening. This feedback from a Jet staffer was useful in helping counter staff realise that you need different strokes for different people at different times.

Soft issues like these sometimes make a difference to the customer. But just in case anything has been missed, Jet makes it a point to seek feedbacks regularly from passengers. From the very beginning, Jet has been offering service monitor questionnaires (SMQ) for passengers to fill out during the flight.

Passengers were asked to rate Jet on topics ranging from accessibility at the airport to cabin crew behaviour, food and the overall experience of flying Jet. "None of us took it seriously in the beginning as there was no pressure to get consumer feedback," says a cabin crew member.

Today, these questionnaires are mandatory on every flight. Not only is the staff encouraged to proactively distribute the forms, it is also announced on the overhead speakers. In March, Jet received 38,000 responses. A year ago, it was less than half that number. Jet uses these SMQs to raise the quality bar. Though most of the ratings for Jet services tend to be good or excellent, the airline asks its staff to improve on ratings periodically. "If we get 60 per cent excellent rating in one area, the crew are asked to get 70 per cent the next time," says Collett.

The quality department says that the bulk of complaints pertain to airport services. In fact, the top five customer complaints account for 32 per cent of the total complaints received by the airline. These include attitude of the staff and handling of situations, rescheduling flights due to weather conditions or unavoidable delays, travel agents and ticketing problems, baggage-related issues and food. The top 10 complaints account for 51 per cent of the total while the top 15 complaints account for 60 per cent.

It is through the assiduous monitoring of customer feedback and complaints that Jet keeps setting itself a moving target for improvements. The airline, which has received several awards for its service performance, was recently awarded the Qimpro Gold Standard for quality. "The Qimpro Gold Award is in recognition of Quality in the Service Industry and reinforces my belief that Jet Airways' continued success will only be possible by providing our customers with quality.

Quality of service and product - on the ground and in the air. I am convinced that the success of Jet Airways would not have been possible had we neglected quality. We in Jet Airways believe that we have to place ourselves in the shoes of our customers and be continuously vigilant to ensure that every shortfall or service detractor is identified and corrected," says Naresh Goyal. Quite.

(This article was first published in the May 2002 issue of Indian Management)