Great Service or a Low Price? | Capable People Blog

The $10000 question. What do customers care most about, standards of service or price? Clearly, in an ideal world, we’d all always want both, but what if it was either/or? To what extent is the customer prepared to sacrifice decent standards of customer service to get the best possible price?

Well it seems like we’ll soon get an answer to that question because “budget” “airline” Ryanair appears hell-bent on testing the tolerance of the customer to shoddy standards of service

Even the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is starting to pass comment. Its not often the OFT uses words like “puerile” to describe a company’s approach to customer service, but they’ve just done so with this outfit. And I’ll bet many of us who have “enjoyed” the Ryanair experience will be easily able to identify with the sentiment

For years Ryanair has been chipping away at the service that they deliver. Continually parring it back to the bare essentials. In the early, heady days of budget airline travel these new boys provided a much needed kick up the back-side to an all too cosy market-place. Their strategy was to get the prices low by streamlining processes and removing a few things that most customers were not that bothered about, such as allocated seating and in-flight meals. But with some the process has become obsessional and lately it seems to have gone a bit far. For example, it may be quite fair to state that a person can avoid the cost of an in flight meal by carrying their own snack on board, but the same argument simply cannot be applied to the use of the toilet. I can’t say whether we’d be allowed to carry a bucket on board a Ryanair flight, but I’d not like to see it tested either way

But its not just the parring back, its the defiant attitude that Ryanair seems almost proud to promote. Never one to pass up an opportunity for free publicity, their rugby shirt wearing chief executive Michael O’Leary is never slow to deliver a personal counter attack to any criticisms that the news channels care to run. This is generally along the lines that the “no frills” service is what the customer must accept if he wants to enjoy their low prices. Put it another way, if they sell at the lowest price and the customer accepts it, then there is no case for complaint about the standard of service. It comes with the turf, get with it. So the low price becomes a bullet-proof excuse for poor service. Its almost as if poor service has become an accepted or even an integrated feature, rather than an undesirable consequence

We need to watch this closely because if Ryanair continues to go the way they have been going, we’ll soon know what the breaking point of the customer is, as they appear to have an unhealthy desire to find it

From a customer service point of view I worry about this approach. I stayed in a Travelodge last week and noticed they were going down that same line, charging extra, for example, to park your car overnight, with steep prices also for the use of the internet. This presents two problems as I see it. First (like Ryanair) you can never really be confident that you know what the final price will be, all add-ons considered. Second, I think it runs the risk of promoting an unhealthy organisational culture. At the start of this post I suggested that in an ideal world we’d all like good service AND the lowest possible price. I have no problem with efficiency, or companies parring back the specification, taking out costly and low value adding features and passing on the saving to the customer, but I do worry about the cultural side effects. Principally a culture of “if you come with us, this is what you get”. So far as service is concerned it often costs little or no more to be nice than to be indifferent. The risk is that staff become obsessed with what constitutes the basic paid-for service, and what should be charged as an optional extra

Looking at Ryanair it looks like the “no frills” strategy has over time promoted a culture, a policy even, of defiant indifference to the customer, and I shudder to think what their complaints policies look like

Ultimately thinking about this has helped me get one thing clear in my own mind:

Service delivery and customer service are not the same thing

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. Please don’t leave before you’ve watched the video clip. It’s a hoot