Severity and Controllability of Service Failures as Perceived by Passengers in Airline Industry

Service delivery is inherently failure prone. Providing “zero defects” services should be the desired objective of all service providers, but problems are unavoidable in the service industry mainly due to the unique characteristics of services (Parasuraman et al., 1985).The characteristics and the typology of the complaints have been studied in fragmented manner (McCollough, 2009). Hence, this research has the following objectives: To find the severity and controllability of the complaint situations as perceived by airline passengers. To classify the complaint situations based on severity and controllability. To find the association between the typology of complaints, namely, process related and outcome related to the characteristics of severity and controllability. In the first stage, the research methodology wasin-depth exploratory interviews with officials of eight airlines. Situations of common complaints were collected and integrated with those in the literature to develop inventory of complaints. An instrument was developed to classify the complaint situation based on perceived severity and controllability. The findings have managerial implications of guiding the officials in assessment of the severity and controllability of the process and outcome related situations.