In line with the objective to increase customer value, JetBlue, a low-cost carrier in the U. S. , have great concerns towards expanding their services by adding number of fleet, which in turn cause the increase in the number of employees as well. The situation, therefore, provides additional challenges for the company as how to cope with communication challenges that JetBlue’s managements face regarding their plan to improve employees’ satisfaction, the addition of 290 airplanes that require additional workforces, and increase customers’ satisfaction. 2. Relevant Factors
The corporate business expansion while generating demands that keep the company alive can be performed successfully when the business is able to create customer value. Customer value creation aims at giving customers more benefits of products they purchase. While we witness various strategy that corporations have done in order to create customer value such as bundled products and low price offering, they often overlook the main thing that customers perceive about value creation. It turns out the basis of value creation is creating customers satisfaction.
The key question is whether all the strategy, product features, adds on and value creation lead to ultimate customer satisfaction. Lower price does not have to lead customers into increasing satisfaction nor does the bundling products. Therefore, it is important to dig what customers really want and how to deliver the products based on the customers’ needs. In order to create appropriate customer value, JetBlue has taken several significant progresses in establishing a strong brand that helps the company stand out of the competition in airlines industry.
At this time, the major perceptions associated with JetBlue are safe, reliable, low-fare airline that is highly focused on customer service, provides an enjoyable flying experience, and is constantly evolving. This association is very important to customers so that they are feeling goods flying with JetBlue. This is because JetBlue has provided appropriate values for customers that JetBlue’s competitors feel hard to meet them as following: a) JetBlue has completion factor of 99. 8% that was higher than other major U. S. carriers were
b) JetBlue has hit on-time performance on arrival of 85. 7% was also higher than other U. S. major airlines were. U. S. Department of Transportation define this performance as the arrival within 14 minutes of schedule c) JetBlue has created lower incidence of delayed, mishandled or lost bags of 2. 33 per 1000 customers than other U. S. airlines. This fact has positioned JetBlue as a value-based company that provides its customers benefits since the major requirements that customers want composes of three things: safe flight, on-time departure and arrivals, and low fares.
3. Applications: Developing Strong Internal Communication 3. 1 Barriers to Effective Communications As mentioned in the case of JetBlue, the company’s program to maintain efficient operation while increasing customers’ and employees’ satisfaction face significant challenges as the company also realize potential pitfalls as the result of the increasing number of airplanes into 280 aircrafts and 25,000 employees within the next five years.
The potential fault is the increasing size of JetBlue organization may cause miscommunication that prevents the company to achieve the goals. In order to keep strong corporate culture in managing communications, therefore, JetBlue needs to develop strong internal culture in conducting communication. However, conducting internal communication in large companies that compose of thousands to tens of thousands employees does not mean it has no barriers at all. In fact, according to JISC RSC Scotland N & E.
(2007), there are several factors influence the effectiveness of communications including physical barriers, culture, language, ethics, and many others. These types of barriers often occur because of the nature of corporate environment (JISC RSC Scotland N & E. , 2007). For instances, a company may located in five-storey building. The company has many departments that located in different level in the building, each has tens to hundreds people. We can imagine that there will be some miscommunication when they meet in a forum or a sharing session since they rarely meet and talk.
Another situation occurs when the company has many departments; each has particular business process and objective. When staffs of the organization, says ones from sales department try to interact with their counterparts in the technical departments; the communication may find great barriers since each party has different objective and the characteristics of people in the two departments are also different as well. Technical staffs tend to be straightforward while sales staffs have tendency to do small talks when dealing with people.
The main causes of this problem may be the failure of managements to bridge the different by employing suitable telecommunication technology and encourage their employees to use the telecommunication tools and gadgets effectively and efficiently (JISC RSC Scotland N & E. , 2007). 3. 2 Design of Communications at work According to Williams (2007), communications is a process of delivering information from one person to another. To deliver information, a person may use different kinds of tools.
However, it is quite to tempting to associate “right technologies” with sophisticated new machines, robots, or any interactive holographic assistants. It turns out that the right technologies for business might be merely a desktop computer or simply a digital voice recorder, depending on the type of business we compete. In large corporations that have hundreds or thousands of employees, communications become serious issue since they rarely communicate one another due to they have full activity.
Under such circumstances, the use of telecommunication technology is beneficial to help employees at a business to alleviate communication barriers among managements and employees. One of the technologies that might help the business in improving the effectiveness of communication is the Internet. Figure 1 shows typical flow of communications at a business when the company deploys communication technology such as Internet-based technology including e-mail, messenger, and intranet. managements Web-site, e-mail, chatboard, etc Employees
Virtual Meeting Rooms Figure 1 Diagram of Communications at a business by employing information technology The figure displays how a company may provide a simple information technology to connect employees and managements by sending and receiving emails, use interactive website where any people in the business can share the ideas and the use of webcam that enables employees to talk with their colleagues without the need to get together in a meeting room. In reality, the implementation of team communications might vary from one corporation to another.
However, it usually involves knowledge sharing in a portal as shown in the Figure 2. The figure shows that a corporation may develop specific portal at which each employee can write their experience and idea. On the other hand, other employees in the corporation may access the shared knowledge to gain previous experience. IBM Corp. is one example that has successfully carried out this kind of peer-to-peer communications over the web (JANSEN, BACH, and OSTERLE, 2000). Example of Corporations Portal Source: (JANSEN, BACH, and OSTERLE, 2000)
In addition to the use of desktop or laptop computers, teams can employ mobile handsets to perform communication over the web. It is possible since most mobile handsets are equipped with Windows Mobile application that enables the handset to perform mobile PC. Figure 3 Teams Communication by Using Mobile Handets 4. Conclusion Google defines customer value as the difference between efforts and money that customers must spend to obtain particular products and services and the benefits that they will get when using the products or services.
The increasing number of companies that serve an industry will cause the intense competition that further force the service providers to bring down price in order to keep customers coming back. In addition, the service providers also face another challenge as customers now become too segmented that require them to serve each segment of customers group in different manner or approach. This condition refers to mass customization. The case of JetBlue informs us about the company’s capability in fulfilling the customers’ basic needs: low cost and on time arrivals.
The success of performing the low-cost carrier model has driven the company to be leading company in low-cost carrier segment in the airline industry in the U. S. Since the development of a company may provide other challenges, this paper has identified the challenge and has provided recommendations of JetBlue faces when increase their services. The challenge is about communication management that intended to result in the improvement of employees and customers’ satisfaction.
Reference:
Holmes, Stanley. (2004). A Sudden Updraft for Boeing and Airbus. BusinessWeek. Retrieved November 27, 2007 from http://www. businessweek. com/bwdaily/dnflash/jun2004/nf20040630_8577_db035. htm Jansen, Christoph M. , Bach, Volker. , and OSTERLE, Hubert. (2000). Knowledge Portals: Using the Internet to Enable Business Transformation. Retrieved November 27, 2007 from http://www. isoc. org/inet2000/cdproceedings/7d/7d_2. htm