Winning ‘Worst Airline’ by Which? is pretty damning. Winning it for six years in a row is quite a feat – yet Ryanair’s apparent strategy of offering poor customer service on the basis that the product is cheap has earned them exactly that. It’s a pretty unsustainable business model in our ultra competitive, disruptor age.
Undercutting your competition only works if you are still offering a product that’s worth paying for – and when other companies such as EasyJet and Jet2 can offer a better customer experience for as little as a tenner more, you can expect travellers to start weighing up what it is they are willing to invest in.
Good service pays, and you can be commercially successful and loved. Ryanair are only the former. Becoming a byword for remarkably poor quality is not only a massive threat to your brand image but also a gift to your competitors. We live in a world where customer service is increasingly seen as the ultimate differentiator with social media radically raising the voice of disgruntled consumers, making everything from airplane food to racist staff rants instantly shareable and giving the modern traveller more information than ever before.
No longer can companies rely on having a monopoly on an air route or a budget fee; cutting easy corners is an easy way to lose your market edge. Jet2, for example, can offer a return flight from Stansted to Alicante for £68, while Ryanair can offer you the same trip for £52. Want to check in a suitcase? That’ll set you back £26 for Jet2, but a whopping £50 for Ryanair. While you ruminate over what you’d prefer to book, you might well be swayed by the fact that Jet2 has a 75% satisfaction rating, with Ryanair coming in at a rather grim 40%. For the sake of £8, many travellers would opt for a better service.
Of course, Jet2 has a more limited network, while Ryanair’s near monopoly on smaller European destinations gives them a lot of market elbow room. But for all of their sprawling empire, Ryanair cannot afford to relax. Booking sites and customer reviews are easier to find and use than ever before, and with complaints ranging from day long delays, raw food and exceptionally rude staff, disruptors who are cunning enough to corner a cheap service with a better customer experience and service led proposition are going to win over their less satisfactory competitors.
I’m an advocate for customer-centric strategies. If you aren’t thinking about how your market is going to react to something, how they will engage with it, and how they are going to perceive and interact with your product or brand, you aren’t paying sufficient attention to the core reasons people do business with you in the first place: because your service is worth more than their money. Think about how your food will taste at 20,000ft. Think about the implications of how you deal with flight delays and disruption to customer journeys. As obvious as it sounds, it’s vital that pricing, product and marketing decisions are made with the customer at the front of your mind.
It’s a crowded marketplace full of eager young disruptors, and Ryanair must adapt in order to succeed in our experience-hungry world. Ryanair has a price advantage on some routes at present. But I genuinely believe that eventually, that will not be enough and a sustained failure to treat customers well will see them lose market share – and could eventually lead to them going out of business.
Martin Newman
Martin Newman is a global thought leader and one of the foremost authorities on digital and customer centric transformation for all consumer-facing businesses.
