When your teenage son begins making up his bed semi-regularly, but his room still looks – and smells - like a disaster zone, how much should you praise the small, welcomed, needed but still inadequate initiative he’s exhibiting?
Headlines in newspapers and online yesterday heralded the seemingly dramatic improvement in airline customer service as reported by the well-respected American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) project at the University of Michigan. U.S carriers’ most recent score of 72 was a 4.3 percent/3 percentage point improvement over the dismal 69 they scored a year ago, and world’s better than the dismal 62 score they registered in 2008. (We’ll cut ‘em some slack for the even worse 61 they scored in 2001 when recession, and then the 9-11 Terrorist Attacks threw the entire industry into emergency self-preservation mode). And their new score of 72 marks only the second time in the ACSI’s history in which airlines scored in the 70s. The other was the baseline year of 1994.
It is a wonderful – even surprising – thing that airlines are improving their customer service enough to score a bit higher on the rigorously conducted ACSI. But let’s keep things in perspective. They may be making their beds fairly regularly now, but U.S. airlines’ metaphorical bedrooms still look – and smell – like a teenager’s disaster zone.
Let’s look at the ACSI numbers:
- There are 48 industries tracked by the ACSI research team. Of those 48, the ACSI no longer issues scores for 5 industries , but retains them in the scoring matrix for historical perspective
- Last year the airline industry was tied with the lowly-regarded “Fixed-Line Telephone Service” industry, the “Health Insurance” industry, and the “U.S. Postal Service” at 69 on the ACSI . That was the second-worst score of the year behind only the “Subscription Telephone Service” industry and “Internet Service Providers” as the worst customer service industries in America.
- This year’s 72 recorded by the airlines would have ranked them fourth from the bottom in 2015’s rankings, above the five industries mentioned above, and above “Wireless Telephone Service,” which scored a 70 in 2015. (The ACSI reports on only a dozen or so industries in the ACSI matrix each quarter, so we won’t know the final 2016 standings until sometime early next year.)
- Airlines' high-water mark score of 72 still is far short of the scores of 82 recorded last year by the “Full-Service Restaurant” and “Televisions and Video Players” manufacturing industry, perennial ACSI top performers.
Okay, so airlines are getting better at the customer service game. Great. Good for them. Good for us. But let’s not get carried away. U.S. airlines are still dismal performers when comes to customer performance. By the ACSI's definition, 28 out of 100 of their customers still come away dissatisfied from the experience of traveling with them, or from merely dealing with them in trying to book a flight or conduct some other business (like locating a lost bag, or getting a refund, etc.).
What would happen to your small business if, say, you were a barber, a butcher or a baker and 28 out of every 100 of your customers were to come away from the experience dissatisfied by the service you delivered? Airlines are too big, too asset-rich, and too necessary to modern life to simply close up shop and go out of business the way such underperforming bakers, barbers and butchers would. But they would become – and, indeed, long have been – the objects consumer scorn and derision.
There are lots of reasons for it, of course, starting with seats that come close to qualifying as medieval torture devices. But the airlines probably get more grief for their uncomfortable seating arrangements than they deserve. That’s on us cheap consumers. We want low fares and lots of flights to meet our demanding life schedules. And that’s extraordinarily expensive to provide. So carriers have found a way to deliver what we really want – frequent, inexpensive air service. But to do that at a profit, they have to squeeze us in like naught peasants crammed into a dungeon.
That does not, however, excuse uncaring, minimalist, and sometimes even rude treatment from unhappy, over-worked and sometimes burned-out employees. Nor does it offset poorly-explained and difficult to navigate “rules” for dealing with all sorts of issues, or slowness/reluctance to fix airline-caused mistakes.
But U.S. airlines’ biggest, longest-running and most infuriating customer service failure continues to be their failure to get their customers where they want to be on time. As noted in a four part series “Airlines 40% Failure Rate” ( see stories here, here, here and here)in this space last summer roughly 40 percent of all U.S. air travelers have arrived late consistently for most of the last 35 years. And unless things change dramatically, about 40 percent of all U.S. air travelers will continue to arrive late every year, perhaps forever. “Officially” that’s not a correct statistic, but only because the government, which tracks on-time data, allows airlines to report arrivals and take-offs as “on time” so long as they occur within 15 minutes of their scheduled time. Yet even using that lenient standard 20-25 percent of flights arrive late.
Most Americans have figured out the airline’s chronic tardiness problem and have learned to adjust their expectations and plans – to a degree. But it still rankles most of us when the flight that’s supposed to arrive at 11 am in plenty of time for us to get to our 1 pm meeting doesn’t pull up to the terminal until 11:40 – meaning we have no shot at being on time for our 1 pm meeting.
Fixing that one, albeit monumental, flaw likely would push airlines to the upper echelons of the ACSI. Getting there on time, almost every time (excluding weather-caused delays) would so delight U.S. travelers that they’d be far more willing to accept that the gate agent’s having a bad day. Operating on time – not within 15 minutes of schedule, but REALLY on time - and all the radical but very achievable process changes that would be required to make that happen also would reduce the number of lost bags and other difficulties that so anger travelers. And – here’s the kicker – it would INCREASE airline profits because the high cost of dealing with “manufacturing defects” (which is what late flight operations are in business analysis terms) would be reduced by extraordinary amounts.
But until U.S. airlines commit themselves to making the significant process management changes necessary to deliver 95 percent of their customers to their destinations on time 95% percent of the time (excluding weather-caused delays and cancellations) they will continue to languish at the bottom of the ACSI.
So it’s good that U.S. airlines now are making up their metaphorical beds on most days. Next they should get to work on cleaning up the rest of the mess.
