I work in a busy vacation rental management agency. We deal with tons of enquiries every day and just occasionally someone in the office will throw up their hands in frustration at a particularly ‘dumb’ question. My response is usually with the quote ‘The meaning of your communication is in the response you get’. What this says is that people don’t always read a web site in the way we expect them to; they miss links that we think are obvious; and often find it just easier to pick up the phone to ask a quick question rather than look for it in on the site.
No-one is infallible and we make mistakes too so I’m always delighted when someone takes the time to let us know there is a broken link, or we have differing information on the site that has confused a visitor. Our staff are trained to listen; to be courteous and to respond appropriately to feedback from customers however it is presented. We are not unusual in knowing that it only takes one poor response to lose a sale and as a small, but rapidly growing company, we are all aware of the impact of the spread of negative comment.
So, I was astonished to read the exchange that took place between Jason Roe, a web developer, and some Ryanair staff over a bug that Jason identified in Ryanair’s site. Read Jason’s blog for the full exchange. It makes for interesting, thought provoking and some hilarious reading.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s good to hear that you have willingness to provide a good and reliable customer service. The fact which you have raised against the visitor of your site is true in most of the cases. It happens really that people don’t follow the proper instruction to search a particular thing on website. They are always in hurry and want a quick response instead of waiting for a minimum time for the required response to be shown on the screen. At times they don’t even understand that this is nothing but a software which is running behind the website’s page and which is made by people. Hence there can be functional errors or bugs in terms of software. I’ve read Jason’s blog and your stuffs’ comments. Those were really interesting as you said.
But according to me the way he penned down is not a friendly approach. We, common people, must let you know about the problems whenever we find it at your site so that you can solve those ASAP for us. We have to understand that it’s for our concern.
To you, Ryanair stuffs, our pledge is to check your site everyday whether it’s really working on properly or not. Hope for the best guys!
Ryan Air very much has the attitude that if you have a problem with its third-world business practices, you must be stupid. We followed all of their rules for online check-in and accessing boarding passes only to be told that we didn’t have a firm enough grasp of the English language to have done it correctly and therefore they were going to charge us 40 euros. Then they claimed our bags were overweight and charged us 15 euros per kilo. This turned out not to be accurate — at check-in for our Delta flight two hours later in Madrid we learned our bags were only 1 kilo over the limit. Given that even a bankrupt airline such as Delta prefers having customers as opposed to having no customers, pissing them off and treating them like idiots, Delta allowed us to shift out belongings from suitcase to suitcase so as not to be charged extra. We also were charged for two bags we didn’t have and were not allowed priority boarding, for which we had already paid. All in all, it was a disaster, and I will never fly Ryan Air again, nor allow anyone I care about to be their customer. That would include all people who believe in human dignity and decency. On the flight, it was freezing, and even with my daughter’s teeth chattering we were simply told in a cold, dispassionate voice that they had no blankets.