Ah Ryanair: the jewel in the crown of customer service yet again proves how far we are from the days when Lord King, (BA’s chairman when it was great) said: the customer is always right. Like Tesco employees (all explained here), the budget airline’s staff have let their guard down online. But unlike Tesco, they are not remotely regretful.
Ryanair’s special brand of service on display for all to see in comments posted on Web designer Jason Roe’s blog.
These are some actual comments that Roe got back when he posted about an apparent mistake on the airline’s site:
From Ryanair Staff #1
“Jason!
you’re an idiot and a liar!! fact is!
you’ve opened one session then another and requested a page meant for a different session, you are so stupid you dont even know how you did it! you dont get a free flight, there is no dynamic data to render which is prob why you got 0.00. what self respecting developer uses a crappy CMS such as word press anyway AND puts they’re mobile ph number online, i suppose even a prank call is better than nothing on a lonely sat evening!!
Later, Ryanair Staff #3 offers this philosophical gem:
“Website is not perfect, Life is not perfect…
If you would work in your pathetic life on a such big project in a such busy environment with so little resources, you would know that the most important is to have usual user behavior scenarios working rather than spending time on improbable and harmless things.”
(This one goes on for a couple more paragraphs, but you get the idea. We later find out Ryanair #3 is “not entiteled to deal with public nor have time”. Clearly.)
Stephen McNamara of Ryanair then offered this explanation to Travolution:
“It is Ryanair’s policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers… our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.”
While Alex Bainbridge’s defence of Ryanair may have its points, it doesn’t come close to addressing the rudeness of the original responses by Ryanair staff.
As Travolution notes, it could all be part of Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary’s PR strategy, which seems to be based on the idea that there’s no such thing as bad publicity (he recently claimed Ryanair might start charging to use on-board lavatories.)
In which case, the company’s got a genius in-house training programme for staff — and could have found a novel way of reducing churn by ensuring their staff’s unique approach to customer care makes them unemployable elsewhere.
Will this hurt Ryanair’s business? Probably not — the brand’s not built on its service ethos, expectations are very low and customers are driven purely by price, not value. Lack of long-term loyalty may not matter for Ryanair’s business model at the moment, but will customers change?
Kaizo Advocacy Index, a biannual measure of a brand’s “recommendability”, claims that negative online conversations around brands have risen in line with the economic downturn and that the brands that will do best from the recession will be those that “reach out” and embrace social media. Calling bloggers “lunatics” isn’t exactly a great start.
