Ryanair

My favourite story of the last few days must be how Ryanair scored a spectacular customer service own goal.

You can get a good summary of the story on the AdRants blog but it’s better to read the original blog post itself, if only to look at the appalling series of abusive comments from Ryanair staff.

Once you’ve recovered from the levels of idiocy shown by these poeple, there are a few points to consider.

It’s irrelevant, really, whether or not Jason found an exploit or that he was bragging about his coding expertise. And he didn’t and he wasn’t. As he says in one of his replies to the moronic Ryanair ‘staffers’, he was a customer trying to use the site and found a bug in the way the site is coded. This happens all the time. Sometimes people blog about it, sometimes they contact the site’s webmaster. It really should not have been such a big deal.

It became a big deal because Ryanair has not implemented a blogging policy and hires people who care more for scoring points than for the reputation of the company they work for. That’s the real problem Ryanair appears to have – a problem far larger than a minor bug in their web site.

Ryanair’s responses indicate three levels of idiocy:

• Level 1 – not understanding the purpose of the original blog post: they could have politely suggested that this was, indeed, a bug but one which led to confusing displays rather than any true ability to get ‘free’ tickets. Then they could have thanked jason for pointing it out, suggested that if he finds more such things to send them an email, and told him – and his readers – that they were working to get this fixed.
• Level 2 – not understanding that blogs are public: ranting and railing at Jason and calling him names is a strategy that would have made any ‘private citizen’ look stupid, churlish, and immensely unattractive. That each of these commenters identified themselves as Ryanair staff – and, by implication, as representing Ryanair – made the company look stupid, churlish, immensely unattractive, and very unprofessional. Just what you want from someone carrying you at 30,000 feet.
• Level 3 – not understanding that bloggers and blog readers are customers: how many times is this going to happen? Where a simple ‘oops, sorry’ would turn things into a non-story, a company reacts like a bitter and jilted lover, stamps feet, slams doors, breaks its toys and creates a maelstrom of news on Twitter and blogs. News travels fast on the web and, whatever the Ryanair spokesman quoted in the AdRants piece might think, more and more of Ryanair’s prospective customers will be getting that news on-line. What’s the last impression these prospects will have of the company they were thinking of using for a cheap flight. Winner in this? Easyjet.

One last point. This guy is a pilot. He’s also a blogger. If that makes him an idiot, Ryanair are in big trouble. They just hired him.