Assessment of Service Quality and Level of Customer Satisfaction at Ethiopian Airlines Aviation Academy
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Date
2015-05
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
In service industries, globally, the subject of service quality remains critical as businesses strive to maintain a competitive position in the marketplace. Some of the fastest growth in economies is expected in knowledge-based industries- such as professional and business services, education, and health services. Due to the very nature of services, service quality is more difficult to measure than quality of a good. Often, there exists a difference between the level of quality actually received and what customers expect to receive. Ethiopian Aviation Academy is one of the Strategic Business Units of the Ethiopian Aviation Group/Ethiopian Airlines. It periodically conducts “Trainee Satisfaction Surveys”. These surveys are mainly focused at evaluating trainees’ feeling about the services of the academy and do not spot where service gaps are. Due to this, they do not help in identifying necessary service improvement interventions. This research paper thus, intends to assess the service quality of the academy as primarily perceived by its trainees by identifying service quality gaps. By doing so, it identifies the level of customer satisfaction. A self-completion questionnaire was developed based on the SERVQUAL instrument and distributed to 193 trainees using a Proportionate Sampling Technique to determine trainees’ expectation and perception of the quality of training. The analysis revealed that overall service quality perceived by trainees was not satisfactory as all the service quality dimensions showed higher expectations than perceptions of services. From the findings, it can be concluded that trainees’ expectations are not met; trainees do not feel that they are engaged in the training process and thus the overall quality of training is low. It is thus recommended that the academy has to improve in all of the defined service quality dimensions with special focus and priority given to engagement, tangibles and empathy to improve the level of overall training quality so as to achieve better satisfaction results
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Keywords
SERVQUAL, Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction