According to Amiruddin (2013), AirAsia’s customer service is still considered as low and unpleasing. In recent years, AirAsia has expanded their electronic online reservation system into different payment systems such as computer reservation system and billing and settlement plan channels rather than just using the direct sales channel.
These systems have eased the customers in their reservation process. However, Hassan (2015) has reported that AirAsia’s customers have been facing problems recently during the online booking process. Errors were kept popping up and customers could not reach the customer service hotline (Hassan, 2015). Thus, the failure of the service had lead AirAsia into undesirable consequences like customer anger, dissatisfaction, complain intention and etc. (Hanum, 2018).
The arising of the issues was due to the lacking of focus on the enhancement of customer service by AirAsia. In order to maintain in a cost leadership position, AirAsia had been overlooked the quality of their customer service. To overcome this issue, AirAsia might improve on their e-service facilities and web-based Customer Relationship Management. An IT professional crew may be recruited by AirAsia in order to superintend their e-commerce system and enhance the design of the web-based.
This IT professional crew will be responsible for reviewing and examining on the AirAsia’s e-commerce system and then identifies the issues and seek out for solutions and recommendations for the particular issue faced. A user-friendly interface and fast website speed were considered as the determinants that facilitate the booking of air ticket and results in customer satisfaction, favorable airline image in consumer’s mind and improve the customer relationship management. Consequently, offering superior service might enable AirAsia in gaining a competitive advantage over its competitors and also attains loyalty customers (Kalaiarasan et al., 2015) Furthermore, AirAsia may continue offering aggressive promotional campaigns or loyalty programs. Today, social media has become an integral part of our life and society and the popular use of social media are still upsurge continually. Thus, social media may act as a tool for AirAsia to enhance the recognition and awareness of the campaigns and programs in the public. Based on the past research studies, researchers have found that organizations that involve social media in their business claim that they have an increase in their profit while other companies have revealed that there is an increasing rate of their market exposure.
Besides, AirAsia can introduce loyalty programs such as lifestyle memberships, a rewards program for frequent flyers, offering smart card which is compatible with the existing ticketless booking. These loyalty programs may help AirAsia in reducing the cost of capturing customers’ attention and increase the brand loyalty among the customers. Even though discount strategy has cause AirAsia to reduce in their short-term profit due to the cutting price on their services, but by implementing loyalty programs may help AirAsia to build and maintain a strong relationship with their customers and thus increase in their long-term profits.
