Customer experience still matters
Last night’s Panorama has been described as both an exposé and ‘hatchet job’ on Ryanair. Xavier Klingenfus blogged about Amazon and Ryanair, saying that both websites aren’t designed in the smartest way and that the cheap look of Ryanair “is often mischievous in terms of pricing as the final price of a flight ticket rarely matches what’s advertised on the homepage”.
Similarly in Panorama, website usability specialist, Claire Mitchell described Ryanair’s confusing website, and the lack of it explaining what questions you had to answer. Subsequently how you could end up buying something you hadn’t meant to.
Ryanair maintain that good customer experience is not “waiting on you hand and foot”, but rather ”getting you to your destination cheaply and on time”. Ultimately, I’d go back to Xavier’s point about our emotional attachment to a brand, the importance of good customer experience to a consumer, and not forgetting the importance of usability – online and offline.
Comments
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John GibbardThere’s something to be said for expectation management here too. Setting aside pure functionality issues for the moment, if RyanAir’s site looked and felt as slick as something like Emirates or British Airways then there would be a disconnect between the onsite and real-world brand experience. There’s something to be said for the obsessional devotion to cost-cutting, a “Ling’s Cars” approach that projects to the user “we haven’t spent money on expensive web designers and usability consultants so that we can save you money on our fares”. Whether this strategy for fare-cutting at any (experience) cost is a sustainable business model remains to be seen but nothing in their continued growth would suggest that it’s harming them right now…
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Darren CornishI agree with John. Don’t underestimate the way that Ryan Air align their experience proposition with their business strategy.
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Charlotte WilberforceThank you for your comments and agreed. Perhaps it doesn’t stop consumers consuming but it does increase the amount of complaints against them. Panorama also noticed that once the confusion on the website was pointed out about insurance, Ryanair amended it to a user friendly check box instead of the hidden drop down menu. Therefore user experience must have been considered.
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Xavier KlingenfusAligning their experience proposition with their business strategy will only work as long as they have the monopoly on cheap flights across Europe. Because “it is so cheap (pricewise)”, we -users- agree to sacrifice the online experience.
However, sacrificing the online experience should be OUR standpoint to buy their services, not Theirs. The design of their site shouldn’t be driven on us compromising the experience for cheap fares.
It would also be interesting to know to which extent their cheap website deliberately attempts to match their “cheap” proposition.
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John GibbardI wonder how much the decision to simplify the insurance drop-down to a check box was one born of the altruistic desire for usability or the egocentric desire to avoid legal action for assumptive selling.
I would say there is really scope for Ryanair to deploy some user-centric thinking through their transactional experiences if only to grease the funnel and ensure that the greatest number of their undoubtedly large potential customer base convert.
