What makes Singapore airline a service champion?

Headnote

Sustaining service excellence: a senior management perspective

Singapore Airlines (SIA) is consistently recognized as the world's "best" airline. It is regularly voted "best business class", "best cabin crew service", "best in-flight food", "best for punctuality and safety", "best for business travelers", "best air cargo carrier" and "Asia's most admired company".

As well as being the "best", SIA is also one of the most profitable airlines. The company's senior management explain how their customer service advantage has been maintained, revealing that customer satisfaction need not necessarily be traded off for profitability.

Key challenges

According to senior managers, SIA clearly understands the high mandate placed on it by discerning and increasingly demanding customers. This poses a serious challenge internally in terms of being the best in every aspect and places enormous stress on the front-line staff. Such high demands and expectations result in a need to constantly change and review everything the airline does.

Top management is also faced with a constant struggle to produce a standardized service that is also highly personalized. SIA approaches all its processes and subprocesses in totality, with each receiving continuous attention for improvement and periodic redesign.

With such an international reputation for service excellence, delivering outstanding service is a major challenge for SIA. The key is the company's total approach - it recognizes that customers are buying a total package of service and that all its components have to excel in every way.

Understanding customers

To remain a service leader in the airline industry SIA aims to...