Organizational Behavior

Emotional Intelligence:

Toward a Better Customer Satisfaction at Saudi Arabian Airlines

Organization:

Saudi Arabian Airlines

Prepared by:

………………………………………….

Instructor

………………………………………….

May 2011

Contents

1. Introduction ……………………………………………………………………. 03

2. Company Background ………………………………………………………… 04

3. Customer Satisfaction and Emotional Intelligence …………………………… 07

4. Listening ………………………………………………………………………. 09

5. Conclusion …………………………………………………………………….. 12

6. Recommendations ……………………………………………………………... 13

References ………………………………………………………………………… 14

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1. Introduction:

This paper is dealing with two main subjects, emotional intelligence and customer

satisfaction. Emotional intelligence (EI) is an ability, skill or, a self-perceived ability to

identify, assess, and control the emotions of oneself, of others, and of groups. In the

growing business field of aviation, innovative and unusual business practices are the new

growth strategies. Airline customers want a change for the better. They do not want the

same stereotype behavior from their airline. What they are looking for now is customer

satisfaction. Customers always want to see the business flexible to their needs. Nothing

evokes more praise than a business that is ready to adjust as per customer needs. The

airline needs to identify these options and work their plans accordingly.

When it comes to improving organizational effectiveness, management scholars and

practitioners are emphasizing the importance of a manager’s emotional intelligence.

Saudi Arabian Airlines are conducting training courses to its employees to enhance their

knowledge about using emotional intelligence when dealing with customers.

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2. Company Background:

The airline was founded as Saudi Arabian Airlines in 1945 and began operations with a

service between Jeddah and Dhahran. The first international route to Damascus was

opened on 10 June 1945. The airline was considered an operating agency of the Ministry

of Defense. That same year, their first airport was established in Kandara, a district of

Jeddah.

During the rest of the 1940s Saudi Arabian expanded, serving new cities (Cairo,

Damascus and Beirut), providing a Hajj pilgrimage service flown from Lydda in

Palestine and purchasing two more DC-3s. The slow but steady growth continued during

the 1950s and services were inaugurated to Istanbul, Karachi, Amman, Kuwait City,

Asmara, and Port Sudan.

The fleet also saw a small growth during the 1950s, with five DC-4s and ten Convair

340s arriving. The CV340 was Saudi Arabian's first pressurized-cabin airplane. In 1959,

the airline's first maintenance centre was inaugurated in Jeddah. Also during this decade,

the very important shuttle route between Jeddah and Riyadh was established.

In 1962 the airline took delivery of two Boeing 720s, making history by becoming the

first Middle Eastern airline to fly jets. On February 19, 1963, the airline became a

registered company, with King Faisal signing the papers that declared Saudi Arabian a

fully independent company. DC-6s and Boeing 707s were later bought, the airline joined

the Arab Air Carriers Organization, or AACO, and services were started to Sharjah,

Tehran, Khartoum, Dubai, Bombay, Rabat, Frankfurt, Geneva, and London.

In 1970s a new livery was introduced, the operating name was changed from Saudi

Arabian Airlines to Saudia on 1 April 1972, and Boeing 737 and Boeing 747 equipment

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was bought. The 737s replaced the DC-9s. The first all-cargo flights between Saudi

Arabia and Europe were also started, and Lockheed L-1011s and Fairchild F-27s were

introduced.

New services, including the Arabian Express no reservation shuttle flights system for the

Jeddah to Riyadh route, and the Special Flight Services (SFS), were founded. Special

Flight Services is still a service the airline offers for government-related and celebrity

flights. Rome, Paris, Muscat, and Stockholm were inaugurated as Saudi Arabian Airlines

cities. Joint operations with Pan Am from Jeddah to New York started on 3 February

1979.

Some new non-route-related services opened during the 1980s for the airline, such as

Saudia Catering. Flights were started to Bangkok, Dhaka, Mogadishu, Nairobi, New

York (Saudi Arabian's flights to New York are the only flights in the world that over-fly

4 continents: it begins in Asia, passing over Africa and Europe, before landing in North

America), Madrid, Singapore, Manila, New Delhi, Islamabad, Seoul, Baghdad,

Amsterdam, and Taipei. Horizon Class, a business class service, was established between

Jeddah and Cairo, and cargo hubs were built at Brussels and Taipei. Airbus A300s,

Fokker F-28s, and Cessna Citations were also added to the fleet, the Citations for the SFS

service. To finish the decade, services were introduced in 1989 to Larcana and Addis

Ababa.

In the 1990s services were introduced to Orlando, Chennai, Tokyo, Asmara, Washington,

D.C., Johannesburg, Alexandria, Athens, Milan, Málaga, and Sanaa.

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Boeing 777s, McDonnell Douglas MD-90s and MD-11s were introduced, smoking was

banned on certain flights to Muslim countries as well as on all domestic flights and new

stewardess uniforms designed by Adnan Akbar were introduced.

A new corporate identity was launched on 16 July 1996, featuring an elegant sand

colored fuselage with contrasting dark blue tailfin, the centre of which featured a stylized

representation of the House of Saud crest. The Saudia name was dropped in the identity

revamp, and Saudi Arabian Airlines was resurrected.

On 8 October 2000, Prince Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, the Saudi Minister of

Defense & Aviation, signed a contract to conduct studies for the privatization of Saudi

Arabian Airlines. In preparation for privatization, the airline is currently restructuring to

allow non-core units including catering, ground handling services and maintenance as

well as the Prince Sultan Flight Academy in Jeddah, to transform into commercial units

and profit centers.

Saudi Arabian Airlines did achieve operational profits in 2002, which doubled in 2003

but the profits are primarily due to over a billion riyal on deferred income amortized

annually in the income statement courtesy of the 70 aircraft gifted to the airline by the

Government.

In 2004 the airline carried over 15 million passengers and recorded a 14% rise in profits.

In April 2005, the Saudi government indicated that the airline may also lose its monopoly

on domestic services. The airline ordered 15 Embraer 170 aircraft in a deal worth $400

million in April 2005.

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3. Customer Satisfaction and Emotional Intelligence:

Emotional intelligence is a combination of competencies. These skills contribute to a

person’s ability to manage and monitor his or her own emotions, to correctly gauge the

emotional state of others and to influence opinions. There is a model of five dimensions

at Saudi Arabian Airlines, each area has its own set of behavioral attributes as follows.

1. Self-awareness is the ability to recognize a feeling as it happens, to accurately

perform self-assessments and have self-confidence. It is the keystone of emotional

intelligence.

2. Self-management or self-regulation is the ability to keep disruptive emotions and

impulses in check (self-control), maintain standards of honesty and integrity

(trustworthiness), take responsibility for one’s performance, handle change

(adaptability), and be comfortable with novel ideas and approaches (innovation).

3. Motivation is the emotional tendency guiding or facilitating the attainment of goals. It

consists of achievement drive (meeting a standard of excellence), commitment

(alignment of goals with the group or organization), initiative (acting on

opportunities), and optimism (persistence reaching goals despite set backs).

4. Empathy is the understanding of others by being aware of their needs, perspectives,

feelings, concerns, sensing the developmental needs of others.

5. Social skills are fundamental to emotional intelligence. They include the ability to

induce desirable responses in others by using effective diplomacy to persuade

(influence); listen openly and send convincing messages (communicate); inspire and

guide groups and individuals (leadership); nurture instrumental relationships

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(building bonds); work with others toward a shared goal (collaboration, cooperation);

and create group synergy in pursuing collective goals.

These five characteristics will be shown to apply to Saudi Arabian Airlines

management’s ability to make effective decisions with emotional intelligence concept.

The key points which Saudi Arabian Airline adhere to for building good customer

satisfaction and experience more emotional intelligence are:

Target: Identify your customer segments and your high-value customers.

Determine the products and services they want.

Focus: What’s your value? It’s not just a list of airline products. You need to

focus on what you’re trying to be to your customers.

Service: Consistent service is great service.

Cost: Keeping costs low is part of the business model in almost every industry

now. However, in the meantime, this should not affect the airline’s customer-

oriented strategy.

At Saudi Arabian Airlines, employees prefer to focus on the definition of Excellent

Customer Service, which is the ability of the airline to constantly and consistently to

exceed customers' expectations. Since satisfied customers are the most important assets

any business, effective customer service programs must strategically include tactics to

preserve and enhance customer service and relationships.

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4. Listening:

Listening is a way of communicating and responding to another person that improves

mutual understanding. Often when people talk to each other, they do not listen

attentively. They are often distracted, half listening, half thinking about something else.

When people are engaged in a conflict, they are often busy formulating a response to

what is being said. They assume that they have heard what their opponent is saying many

times before, so rather than paying attention; they focus on how they can respond to win

the argument.

It happens frequently that employees from Saudi Arabian Airlines at the customer service

section experience conflicts or clashes with customers. If those employees did not listen

attentively to the voice of the customer and try to have some emotional intelligence; the

reputation of the organization will definitely become very bad.

Therefore, Saudi Arabian Airlines tries to emphasize the importance of emotional

intelligence as embodied in the concept of active listening for example.

Active listening is a structured form of listening and responding that focuses the attention

on the speaker. The listener must take care to attend to the speaker fully, and then repeats,

in the listener’s own words, what he or she thinks the speaker has said. The listener does

not have to agree with the speaker – he or she must simply state what they think the

speaker said. This enables the speaker to find out whether the listener really understood.

If the listener did not, the speaker can explain some more.

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Often, the listener is encouraged to interpret the speaker’s words in terms of feelings.

Then the speaker can go beyond confirming that the listener understood what happened,

but can indicate that he or she also understood the speaker’s psychological response to it.

Active listening has several benefits. First, it forces people to listen attentively to others.

Second, it avoids misunderstandings, as people have to confirm that they do really

understand what another person has said. Third, it tends to open people up, to get them to

say more. When people are in conflict, they often contradict each other, denying the

opponent’s description of a situation.

This tends to make people defensive, and they will either lash out, or withdraw and say

nothing more. However, if they feel that their opponent is really attuned to their concerns

and wants to listen, they are likely to explain in detail what they feel and why. If both

parties to a conflict do this, the chances of being able to develop a solution to their mutual

problem becomes much greater.

The difference between hearing and listening:

Hearing is the process in which sound waves strike the eardrum, causing vibrations,

which are transmitted to the brain.  Hearing cannot be stopped at will: the ears will pick

up sound waves and transmit them regardless of whether or not you choose to hear the

sounds that create them.

Listening happens when the brain reconstructs the electrochemical impulses into a

representation of the original sound and in turn applies meaning to them.  Listening does

not occur automatically as is the case with hearing.  We can deliberately decide not to

listen.  At other times, we may think we are listening, when actually you have stopped the

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cognitive process involved in listening.  During this situation, we are merely hearing. 

The act of being able to repeat a message we have just received does not require an

understanding or active listening; the process is made possible because we can retrieve

the message from our short-term memory.

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5. Conclusion:

Emotional intelligence (EI) has received a substantial amount of attention in the

Organizational Behavior literatures in recent years. EI measures incrementally predict job

performance when measures of personality and cognitive intelligence are also included as

predictors. Personality measures have been shown to be excellent predictors of important work-

related variables, such as transformational and transactional leadership, as well as leadership

emergence and leader performance. In Saudi Arabian Airlines, they implement effective

customer service strategies at the organization to support marketing and keep customers

happy and satisfied.

This paper concluded that the principle used by Saudi Arabian Airlines to achieve

excellent customer satisfaction is focus on emotional intelligence, especially the concept

of listening because it happens frequently that employees from Saudi Arabian Airlines at

the customer service section experience conflicts or clashes with customers. If those

employees did not listen attentively to the voice of the customer and try to have some

emotional intelligence; the reputation of the organization will definitely become very bad.

It is concluded that customer relations in Saudi Arabian Airlines is emotional-building

feelings of trust, goodwill, and respect between Saudi Arabian Airlines and its customers.

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6. Recommendations:

The following are my recommendations based on the principles used by Saudi Arabian

Airlines to achieve excellent customer satisfaction:

Listen with care and attention to customers.

Avoid negative emotions such as depression and frustration when dealing with

customers.

Personalize Service - show concern about what matters to customer (greet customers

by name, know their preferences …etc.).

Provide Creative & Flexible Service – in other words, recognize customers' individual

needs and provide them with appropriate options and alternatives that respond to

those needs.

Educate Employees - employees must know the value the customer as a form of

job security.

Maintaining customers maintains the need for the employees. Losing customers

reduces the need for employees, while inversely; gaining customers increases the

need for employees and their value to the organization (pay raises, bonuses).

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1402-1412.

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11. www.saudiairlines.com

12. www.marketingprofessionals.com

13. www.about.com

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