Why do Asia-Pacific airports excel in ACI’s annual Airport Service Quality (ASQ) customer satisfaction survey? Mark Adamson investigates.

What makes Asia-Pacific airports so special? How do they manage to maintain their levels of service? Is it cultural and political differences that are difficult for other countries to imitate or are there basic tenets, management techniques and expertise, which can be learnt from and improved upon?

In short, can European or American airports hope to match the levels of passenger satisfaction and customer service achieved in Asia?

After analysing the ASQ data for 140 airports around the world, it is clear is that there is no one factor or simple solution to providing outstanding levels of service.

Top performing airports understand where to prioritise and make sure that they keep on top of the key aspects of the airport. They regularly renovate and innovate; and if there are unavoidable weaknesses in the overall service offering, focus on their strengths to differentiate themselves.

This is particularly true of small airports, which can capitalise on their size to provide a friendly, swift, hassle free experience, which is truly appreciated by anyone who travels regularly through large hubs.

Employing the right staff is an obvious essential for great customer service. Indeed, many organisations recognise that the quality of their staff is their greatest strength.

Cultures that are highly attuned to the concept and provision of service will therefore always have an advantage. This is one of the factors in Asian airports being top of the satisfaction rankings.

However, passenger contact with airport staff usually means that the passenger has a problem. A perfect airport experience is one where the passenger has no need for the airport staff.

A fundamental and sometimes uncomfortable truth is that the origins of a great airport experience are often in the airport’s architecture, its ambience and the practicality of its design and building materials.

Piecemeal approaches to airport development and renovation often result in the lack of a coherent overall strategy for presenting passengers with a consistently clean, pleasant and spacious facility.

It is often forgotten that getting from the terminal entrance into the airplane swiftly and with the minimum of hassle is a passenger’s fundamental requirement of an airport. If the facilities are also operating above their intended capacity, it is no wonder that the quality of the passenger experience declines.

Regular investment is a key part of a strategy of continued excellence, but airports do not all have the same level of funding or backing (or perhaps motivation?) from their owners and governments.

For several Asian cities, the airport has long been their primary or only connection with the outside world. Recognising the importance of providing extensive connections and a world-class facility to attract tourists and business, some governments have made it a priority to ensure their airports are among the best in the world.

For cities which are less visibly reliant on the airport for their economies, investment is often slowed or delayed due to competing infrastructure projects, environmental concerns, space issues (including costs) and a desire for maximising profitability and non-aeronautical income.

The sheer cost of airport facilities means that making do with or simply extending or renovating an old facility conceived in the middle of the last century often seems to make better financial sense than starting afresh.

For this reason, many airports receive average passenger satisfaction scores. The world-class, brand new terminal is counter-balanced by the older ones.

ASQ results show that outstanding airport services are based on a consistent overall passenger experience. This means efficient passenger flows and consistent quality of facilities throughout the airport.

However, new facilities alone do not explain the Asian excellence or we would see similar passenger satisfaction scores at new airports around the world.

The facilities may be the foundation of the airport experience, but the airport management defines, creates and maintains the ambience. The airport staff (including staff in shops, restaurants, customs and security, since most passengers assume they all work for the airport) are responsible for delivering this vision of service.

A key point to remember is that service is not just the responsibility of customer facing staff; some of the most important aspects linked to customer service are not customer facing. Cleaners, baggage handlers and baggage cart handlers for example. Small details such as assigning gates close to the terminal wherever possible are a simple matter of having a service mindset. This means shorter walks for passengers and can make huge differences to passenger perceptions. Everyone needs to focus on the passenger for truly outstanding service.

So how do Asian airports do it? The ASQ programme shows that there are a number of key similarities in how the top airports are managed. In short, the top airports prioritise and focus on the key factors that drive passenger satisfaction at their airport.

Analysis of the ASQ data shows that these are also the key factors that drive passenger satisfaction for all airports regardless of size and location. Put another way, there are some universal truths to the airport experience.

The difference between top airports and the rest is that for various reasons – old facilities, operating over capacity, poor terminal design, poor overall strategy, heavy focus on non-aeronautical revenue generation or simply poor management and employees’ lack of pride in the airport – lower ranked airports have implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) prioritised other factors.

The airports with the very highest passenger satisfaction scores pursue excellence in the key areas with a single-minded zeal. They ensure that efforts and initiatives are always focused on aspects of service, which will impact the customer and will drive passenger satisfaction higher. ASQ analysis splits the different aspects of customer service into two broad groups: ‘satisfiers’ and ‘dissatisfiers’. The satisfiers drive satisfaction, the dissatisfiers drive dissatisfaction.

Continued investment in satisfiers can continually improve overall satisfaction but, crucially, after a certain level, continued investment in dissatisfiers has no impact. Consider this example – ten dollars for a cup of coffee causes outrage, one dollar for a cup of coffee causes indifference, twenty cents for a cup of coffee also leads to indifference. Therefore why bother offering a twenty-cent coffee? Knowing which services to limit and when to limit them can make big differences to available resources.

Finally, the top airports leave little to chance. Most have devoted considerable resources to motivating their staff and accurately measuring and monitoring performance and, importantly, making these statistics and improvement of them part of the day-day business language at all levels of the organisation.

By creating an organisational culture driven by quantitative measurement and systematic improvement, high quality service is easier to identify, monitor and promote.

Clearly, staff motivation is a vital aspect in this approach, but cultures which for various reasons prefer not to use such structured, quantitative approaches (Relying instead on ad hoc systems such as comment cards or individual experiences to identify passenger perceptions), are condemned sooner or later to confusion.

Passengers who voluntarily fill in comment cards are invariably those who have been sufficiently polarised by a single experience, usually negative and usually one single aspect of the airport. Therefore, the airport is reacting to a vocal minority, which is often not truly representative of the majority of the airport’s passengers – and is all too often complaining about peripheral issues.

Top performing airports aim to improve the perception of the majority; they focus on the factors that influence passenger satisfaction and they create systems within their organisations that allow them to improve measurably year after year.

ASIA-PACIFIC AIRPORTS/JANUARY-MARCH 2009