An analysis of the cognitive processes related to “service awareness” of cabin attendants

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to develop a way by which junior cabin attendants (CAs) can get the customer service skills dependent on experience as soon as possible. To achieve this, it is effective to analyze the service skills of skilled CAs. We argue that one customer service skill that varies widely among CAs, depending on variation in work experience, is “service awareness.” The term “service awareness” is defined as a related series of cognitive skills that includes “the CA perceives a passenger’s needs before that passenger verbalizes them and finds ways to satisfy those needs.” This research will examine the cognition processes of the CAs as they perform customer service. Cognition in this context refers to things the CAs noticed as well as their feelings and thoughts while providing service. We record CAs’ customer service behavior and conducted retrospective interviews referring to the footage. After that, we analyze the interviews based on the grounded theory approach to get to know the relationship between cognition and conducted customer service. As a result, we gained an understanding that the cognitive process of “inferring a passenger’s persona and investigating services to fulfill it” is crucial.