Enhancing Customer Loyalty Through Service Quality: Reviving Strategic Competitiveness of Pakistan International Affairs

Abstract

The customers’ satisfaction and brand loyalty are indispensable prerequisites, for an airline to stay competitive. To gain understanding of the factors affecting Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) declining performance, this research investigates PIA’s service quality, passenger satisfaction, passenger loyalty and empirically examine the directional relationship among these three constructs. The research investigated the airline service quality evolved around the SERVQUAL dimensions based on the different stages of providing services to passengers covering both attitudinal and behavioral aspects of satisfaction and loyalty. The study investigated 360 passengers of PIA and 200 passengers of Emirates airline through convenience sampling technique. The survey was conducted in four major airports in Pakistan, namely, Karachi, Peshawar, Lahore and Islamabad, The data were analyzed using a variety of descriptive and statistical techniques. The descriptive analyses included mean, median, mode and demographic analysis of the passengers on the basis of gender, age, cities and designations of the respondents. The reliability and validity of the research are checked through Cronbach’s alpha, PCA and CFA. The study applied correlation, regression and T-tests to test the hypothesis of the study. The results revealed that all dimensions of expected service quality have a positive significant effect on expected customer satisfaction and expected customer loyalty except expected assurance, which shows the positive insignificant effect. The results demonstrated positive significant effect of all dimensions of actual service quality on actual customer's satisfaction and actual customer's loyalty except actual responsiveness which shows a significant negative effect on both actual customer satisfaction and actual loyalty. The results predicted significant difference in expected and actual dimensions of service quality i.e tangibility, reliability, responsiveness and empathy, however assurance show insignificant difference. Expected Customer Satisfaction and actual Customer Satisfaction also showing insignificance difference. The results also predicted insignificant difference between expected Customer loyalty and actual customer loyalty. The results also confirmed the significant difference in PIA and Emirates Airline ii service quality and Emirates found better in this regards, revealed from the T-test comparative results conducted on the bases of both expected and actual service quality dimensions. The overall findings of the study indicate that the service quality is highly related to passenger satisfaction and passenger’s loyalty both and, the level of Emirate’s Airline service quality is better than the PIA. The suggestions are given to PIA.