Improving service quality through managing customer contact: case of airlines

Service products are consumed by customers as soon as they are produced and delivered. In the service operations, customer contact is an essential part of the service delivery process. Often, the mode and degree of customer contact affects the service quality, and thus customer contact could be an important determinant of service quality. Customer contact is an important element of service process design and management for such industries as airline, hotel, restaurant, etc. In customer contact, there are two aspects: quantity and quality of contact. In this paper, we focused on the quantity aspect of customer contact and investigated its impact on service quality. This paper examines the relationships between the degree of customer contact, i.e., a quantitative measure, and the service quality, and attempts: 1) to assess the impacts of customer contact on the service quality; 2) to identify important elements of customer contact that has significant impacts on the service quality. Data were collected from the customers who use airlines. Survey questionnaire was developed based on the previous research in this field, and used for data collection.