Southwest Airlines: Operational Excellence, Customer Centricity, and Sustainable Success

Southwest Airlines: Operational Excellence, Customer Centricity, and Sustainable Success
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Introduction
The global airline industry has continued experiencing tremendous growth over the past few years, due to the increased rate of globalization catalyzed by technology. It is these elements also that the industry needs to harness to ensure that it increases performance and profitability. Southwest Airlines is one of the leading in the business, particularly in the U.S. it has continued growing in the industry, managing to stay afloat amidst cutthroat competition from other established airlines. The company stands at a crucial stage in its business, and needs to evaluate its strategy to ensure it keeps up the competitive nature it has over other players.
Southwest Airlines: Operational Excellence, Customer Centricity, and Sustainable Success
Southwest Airways is known as an LCC in the air transport sector, providing excellent services, efficient operations, and outstanding business results. Its innovative organizational setup, performance scorecard, and technology-driven environment have played a part in this accomplishment. Southwest's operating strategy emphasizes achieving sustainable competition through improved costs, process efficiency, and customer focus. Southwest's operational strategy is based on bringing down the costs of air travel and putting its services within reach of many to satisfy customers' needs. Its one-of-a-kind business strategy is based on simplicity (Sarkar, 2021). The company strives to eliminate unnecessary complexities and costs with high standards of services. The present paper seeks to understand how Southwest attempts to maintain a competitive edge in the airline sector, underpinning sustainable operational features. Their relevance for customer experience essentially defines the importance of operational functions. The focus on streamlined operations, faster turnaround time, and employee-centered culture have a great impact on customer satisfaction at Southwest. This paper will identify two main operational challenges that Southwest faces through a critical analysis and suggest measures of counteracting these problems for improved customer' experiences. Assessing Southwest's value chain will illustrate how its processes regarding quality, worth generation, and consumer happiness are working out. In addition, a focus will be placed on performance measures considered in SW's SDSD and why they are relevant in evaluating operational efficiency (Wirtz & Zeithaml, 2018). The paper aims to provide a comprehensive discussion of operational strategies employed by Southwest, its performance measurement systems, and its use of technology. The paper shall describe how these influences affect the organization's general performance and suggest ways of dealing with operational problems and remaining relevant in the marketplace. I shall also appraise Southwest's value chain and evaluate it to contribute to the provision of quality, value addition, and customer satisfaction. Lastly, the paper shall discuss pertinent perfo...