Is Good Customer Service All It Takes?

Forming and nurturing good relationships between a company and its customer base is the one of the most vital and effective actions a company can take to ensure their success. Promotional engagement of a company or brand is an effective marketing strategy as it directly engages consumers; the consumers can see their in-put from the changes the company has adopted and a relationship between the consumer and company will be developed through this engagement. An example of a company that has begun to change its image through engagement marketing, by listening to their consumers and implementing the changes they have suggested is Ryanair.

Ryanair, the budget airline, has seen its net income double in the second quarter of 2014, rising to £156m. Their chief financial officer Howard Miller has put this down to improvements in customer service. The previously reviled airline company, seems to be turning its image around and attracting new customers that would have previously shunned the company. Within a year Ryanair saw their number of passengers increase by 3% up to 81.7 million. They have put this mostly down to improving customer experience and enhancing their service through many small changes. These include:

  • Allocating seats

    Issues with bad customer service a thing of the past?

    Issues with bad customer service a thing of the past?

  • Simpler website design
  • Free 2nd carry on
  • ‘Quiet flights’
  • 24 hour grace period for booking errors to be corrected
  • Reduced boarding card and bag fees
  • A new service for group bookings and corporate travellers
  • Families can receive discounts

These are initiatives from the ‘Always Getting Better‘ programme which is hoped to keep increasing the number of Ryanair passengers and expand their customer base to encompass corporate travel and business customers. So maybe good customer service really is all it takes to be successful. Ryanair was previously known for its extremely cheap flights but terrible customer service (there are many horror stories circulating about the service of the Ryanair airline and it was even been cited as the worst brand for customer service in 2013), but now it seems to be turning its image around, keeping its low cost flights and improving its other services to really compete with other budget airlines. Although, it may take some time to see how effective this customer service reform is in the long term on their image as a budget airline; there seems to be a lot of negativity  to dispel first.

 

The QRi Team x

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