Thought this letter to customer service and their response might be of interest to the larger SIA passenger community. While inflight service recovery was disappointing, the response from customer service is personal and fairly impressive.

Overall though I am concerned that SIA and / or their cabin crew may be taking their India flights (which by all accounts in a very lucrative market for them) a bit for granted. This impression is based on regular Singapore-India travel in the last 3 years, in both business and economy class. They appear to be cutting corners and do not appear to be going the extra mile, which may be a mistake as competition improves (especially with Jet Airways putting brand-new A330s with superior physical product, particularly in business class which has lie-flat seats, on the India-Singapore routes).

Hopefully letters such as this reach the right people at SIA to make sure they do not continue to let their service standards slip in this market.

(The email chain below has been edited to protect identities)

My note to customer service via www.singaporeair.com :

My family and I flew on SQ 517 on Jan 2 CCU-SIN (Calcutta-Singapore). We had seats 45A thru 45D on the flight. The AVOD system (interactive mode) was not working on seats 45A and 45C. The cabin crew tried to fix it by resetting the system several times, to no avail.

Though the crew was apologetic about it, I was surprised that there was no attempt made at any type of service recovery.

Further, children's amenity kids were not handed out either on this flight -- has SQ discontinued these? (Note that these were not handed out on our SIN-BLR (Bangalore) flight on Dec 15 either. My children are 5 and 7 years old).

(Response from SIA received today, in less than 24 hours)

Mr Sankaps
Singapore

4 January 2008

Dear Mr Sankaps

SQ517 / 02 January 2008 , Kolkata-Singapore

Warm greetings. Thank you for your e-mail dated 3 January 2008.

I am very sorry to learn that the inflight entertainment at your seats had malfunctioned. We certainly recognise that inflight entertainment is an important aspect of our onboard service, therefore we would like to offer you our sincere apologies upfront.

We are committed to providing quality inflight entertainment onboard our flights. Regular checks are done by our engineers prior to take-off to ensure that the system is serviceable. We regret that in spite of these checks, a technical failure had happened.

Please be assured that our Technical Services Manager will be conducting another inspection to ensure that the problem has since been rectified upon
arrival.

Our cabin crew should have offered you an alternative seat, in view of your problems with the inflight entertainment system. If an alternative seat was not available, they should have provided you with service recovery. We regret
that this gesture was not extended to you on this occasion.

Further to your feedback, I am concerned to hear that the cabin crew did not hand out children’s amenities on your flights. We have highlighted this to our Cabin Crew Manager, who will counsel the cabin crew concerned. These items should be pro-actively given out to the children onboard.

As a gesture of our sincere apologies, we have arranged for an inflight gift voucher worth USD100 to be delivered to you at the above address. You can redeem the voucher for inflight gift items onboard our flights or through mail order. We hope that you will choose a gift item of your liking onboard or via www.krisshopair.com.sg.

Once again, our apologies for your disappointment on this occasion, Mr Sankaps. We look forward to welcoming you onboard again under more pleasant circumstances.

Yours sincerely

xxx
Manager Customer Services

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