The Quality Journey of an ASQ Survey

ACI’s Airport Service Quality (ASQ) programme is now in its 12th year. As airport membership grows, alongside with the various product offerings, Arison Rajasingam, Quality Control Analyst at ASQ, explains how ACI maintains integrity to ensure that the benchmarking and findings from the ASQ departure survey remain one of the highest quality deliverables the industry has to offer in passenger surveys.

What you should know about ASQ departure survey

ACI’s ASQ is a global benchmarking programme that measures passenger satisfaction during travel through an airport. Participating airports receive quarterly results based on data collection that is conducted throughout the year. 

Did you know?

This one-of-a-kind programme boasts one of the most extensive quality systems applied to a passenger survey programme. ASQ applies a three-level quality funnel process which combines both remote and on-site auditing to review a total of 157 unique checkpoints.

Is it necessary and what is the added value of this quality system?

Our mission is to provide reliable data that is a true representation of airports’ service quality. We deliver on this promise by using a proactive quality system that detects anomalies in data collection with regard to the “who, when, where and how” of the survey methodology. The number of quality checkpoints, airports reviewed and audits play an important role in the early detection and assurance of quality data.

What happens at each level of the quality system?

Level 1 of the quality system reviews 100 different checkpoints focusing on thedistribution of surveys during a quarter. This is to ensure that the surveys collected represent a true sample of domestic/international traffic, months, days, hours and passengers. All participating airports are reviewed each quarter for their adherence to all the checkpoints in this level. A total of nearly 600,000 questionnaires (or passenger surveys) are reviewed annually.

Level 2 consists of 26 checkpoints that focus on how airports collect their surveys.  Airports can be randomly selected for Level 2 verification or specifically chosen if an airport flags quality checkpoints reviewed in Level 1, displays a significant increase in quarterly scores, constantly displays high scores across multiple quarters or ranks high in their region/size.

A key checkpoint in Level 2 is handwriting analysis.  Each quarter, the ASQ quality team selects airports and visually inspects the physical copies of passenger surveys. The uniqueness of a passenger’s handwriting is used to authenticate the written responses.

Complementing remote audits in Levels 1 and 2 is the on-site evaluation which constitutes Level 3 of quality system. For this step, ACI engages a third-party auditing firm to observe that data collection follows ASQ guidelines.  On-site evaluation is conducted over two days and auditors verify 31 different checkpoints.

How does the ASQ team facilitate airports’ adherence to guidelines?

ASQ team members work closely with airports to ensure the integrity and quality of their data by providing guidelines, training and quality tools. One of the newest items in the ASQ tool kit is the distribution criteria tracker. Airports can now monitor if their survey collection satisfies the ASQ distributions rules (domestic/international traffic, month, day) in real time and adjust their data collection to meet guidelines.  

Join ASQ in taking a proactive approach to quality and delve deeper into understanding your customer’s needs.