Ryanair is Flying Low with Passenger Satisfaction
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Ryanair has been making large volumes of customers very unhappy with their administrative mistake, having detrimental impact that will continue for months! The budget airline has been cancelling between 40-50 flights a day due to too many pilots taking annual leave at the same time.
The situation has been made much worse by the way Ryanair have handled notifying the passengers, some only finding out on their day of travel when being called to their gate. Others customers have been stranded in another country, needing to return home but being let down by the airline.
Click4Assistance’s customer Which?, the consumer watchdog commented on the situation to The Daily Telegraph, spokesperson Alex Neill said “Ryanair’s approach to informing affected passengers about compensation falls woefully short. It is legally required to spell out compensation rules when a flight is cancelled and in our view, has so far failed to do that, leaving passengers hunting around for information.
“This is another blow for the thousands of passengers who have already had to endure huge inconvenience as a result of this fiasco. The airline must now automatically compensate eligible passengers without them having to go through the additional hassle of making a claim.”
When passengers have been attempting to contact Ryanair to find out information, get their flights refunded or rebooked they have been met by a very firm brick wall, the airline’s phone lines have been jammed and to make matters worse it has been reported that they intentionally had their web chat offline.
How It Should Have Been Handled
Firstly, the airline knows what pilots are going to be unavailable on annual leave, therefore should know which flights will be affected and should inform passengers in plenty of time, before they get to their gate! When a delay or cancellation occurs, passengers should be notified rather than keeping them in the dark, which results in them hunting for information and a high volume of customers enquiring at the same time, which can cause a stress on phone lines and increase the panic amongst the travellers.
Ryanair’s web chat should have been online and as well-resourced as possible, the communication channel can hold multiple chats at any one time, therefore would have been the more productive method to handling customer enquiries. To help customer service representatives, queuing can be enabled. The functionality isn’t usually recommended as visitors should instantly get through to a member of staff, however with the large volume the airline was experiencing; queuing would have aided the operators in handling the chat effectively.
If the airline was using Click4Assistance, management could have added the information into the system as predefined replies, customer service representatives would have access to these during their chats, helping to provide the most recent updates to passengers. Alternatively, if Ryanair had a service disruption page on their website that they were updating regularly, the operator could automatically redirect the visitor in chat to that page with Auto-Navigation, this opens the selected URL in a new tab of their browser. Supplying accurate information quickly helps to calm passengers and relieves the severity of the situation.
And this doesn’t have to happen just on the website, the airline were sending SMS messages and emails with the cancellations and delay information, a link to Ryanair’s chat could have been included in the content and any social media posts, allowing passengers to contact the airline’s representatives from any location whether they were at home, travelling to or in the airport.
Don’t let a crisis get out of hand like Ryanair has done, the recent events will be very damaging for the company and they will need to turn themselves around before anyone forgets what has happened. Live chat integration can help ease a situation, for more information on Click4Assistance’s solution, contact our team on 01268 524628 or email theteam@click4assistance.co.uk.
