Delivering Excellent Service Quality in Aviation: A Practical Guide for Internal and External Service Providers

In today's competitive world, many business organisations understand that excellent service quality is the clue to success, but at the same time they realize that delivering excellent service quality is a major challenge. Most products and services are designed and delivered by a complex network of highly interdependent external and internal customer‐supplier relationships. In each one of these relationships, customer expectations are compared with the actual delivery performance. The book of Mario Kossmann gives a practical guide for creating the right match between expectations and performances at every step in the value chain of the aviation industry. Core players in the network of this industry are aircrafts manufacturers, airline operators and airport operators. Delivering the right level of service quality to the passengers will depend on how each of these players is able to manage their service quality as well internally as externally.

The book can be divided in three main parts. The first part describes three well‐accepted theories and frameworks to study service quality: the gaps model of service quality, the importance‐performance matrix with special attention for five performance objectives and finally some aspects related to the management of change. These theories and frameworks are then used in the second part to develop the “service quality cycle” which offers a step‐by‐step approach to systematically control and improve service quality as perceived by the customer. The cycle includes six steps such as the generation and ranking of service standards, the measurement of performance, the selection and implementation of action items and the closing of the cycle. In the last part of the book, a case study on the relationship between internal service providers and their customers in a leading aircraft manufacturing company is presented. This case study builds on and illustrates the six steps service quality cycle.

Although the book is primarily written for use in the aviation industry, it is also beneficial in other service sectors. The practical step‐by‐step guide to manage service quality can help many service managers to define service standards and to measure service performance in their business. The importance‐performance matrix and the analysis of the positioning of customer‐driven service standards in this matrix are very helpful in making the discussion on service quality more visual and tangible. The detailed examples on how this works in the case study further open the eyes of the reader.

Mario Kossmann makes it very clear from the beginning of the book. The book describes an easy‐to‐use practical guide for both external and internal service providers in the aviation context. The guide can be used in an effective way as shown in the case study. The reader should not expect to find in the theoretical chapter any critical appraisal on service quality and the underlying frameworks such as the gaps model of service quality or the five performance objectives. Instead, the author offers in the theoretical part some nice practical examples on what is going in the aviation industry (although it is not always clear how these examples relate to the theoretical issues).

The practical six steps approach in the second part of the book does not incorporate entirely all of the theories discussed. It would be an advantage at the end of the book to go back to the “gaps model of service quality” to learn which aspects have been incorporated in the approach and which not (and why not).

Although the case study is very useful, the reader gets sometimes the impression that it is more like an illustration than a case study. Going through the service quality cycle four times in one year also seems unrealistic for many other business situations.

In terms of a gaps model, the book of Mario Kossmann is able to close the gap between academic theory and business reality. The practical guide of the service quality cycle, embedded in well‐accepted theory and experienced in the reality of a main aircraft manufacturer, is inspiring for every manager who is interested in delivering excellent service quality.