Discretion needed if Ryanair is to put the cheerful back into cheap

MICHAEL O’Leary needs me. He may not know he needs me, but he really does. If he’s going to turn Ryanair towards customer care, then bottom to top training is going to be required, and I’m his woman.

Normally, when businesses come to my company for customer care training, it happens because a survey or audit of their customers has established that they’re a few notches below where their board of directors would like them to be.

It may be that customers don’t like the way the company’s phones are answered. Or that they don’t like the fact that the company’s phones are never answered. Or that the company communicates only on the web so customers cannot reach a human being on the telephone at all, at all.

Customers are picky people, you see. Very, very picky. They like to be treated as if they were human beings, rather than cogs in a wheel. They like their name to be employed. They like to be listened to and looked at. They also like to get the service they signed up for and they don’t like being ripped off.

But they will forgive a rake of offences if they’re treated like human beings. Even better, they notice when it happens. In one financial institution, for example, front-of- house people were told that doing a tot on a calculator is never as important as a human arriving in front of the person doing the tot, and so any task other than serving that individual should immediately be abandoned in favour of coping with the person. The financial services staff who changed their normal behaviour in accord with this single rule were startled to find that it showed up in an improved customer rating at the next audit.

We’re not as easily seduced as the average Labrador, but we’re nearly as pathetic, as a species, in our hunger for positive attention and a bit of the oul’ eye contact.

Customer care training can be easy and rewarding when you’re dealing with people who like their customers and are proud of the product or service they offer. But it’s even more fun when you’re dealing with people who truly hate their customers.

One call centre devoted to solving the problems facing users of a particular device had a series of entertainingly vile cartoons of their most hated customers, with bubbles filled with customer vacuities. The poster- sized caricatures were displayed at the end of each row of cubicle partitions.

The folk who spent their days in the cubicles could do spirited mimicry of each difficult customer, and confessed that after a while they would transfer particular bugbears to the call centre staff who hated them most, so that everybody could watch the staffer getting defensively pompous under an all-too-familiar verbal assault.

One of them had a theory that hatred follows a bell curve model, and that once you’ve reached the apex of pure loathing, if the abusive customer relationship continues, you end up kind of liking the horrible caller.

What makes Ryanair’s change of heart (not that they’ve had one, up to now) so interesting is why it happened.

It seems to have coincided with, rather than have been caused by the airline’s refund to the Beaumont neurosurgeon whose family died in a fire in England.

Which? magazine putting them near the bottom of a hundred companies in terms of customer care can’t be the reason, because Which? magazine has been banging on about Ryanair for so long, O’Leary came up with a quotable quote about the publication: It’s only read in dentists’ offices.

Even the spin-off coverage in mainstream media has never bothered O’Leary.

Au contraire; Ryanair’s boss has built the company’s image and his own on being unresponsive (that’s the company) and crudely comedic in response (that’s him, personally). Of course they’ve lost custom through being the wasp of the airline business (colourful, noisy and pointlessly vicious). But not as much as they’ve gained.

Whatever the reason for the firm purpose of amendment, its implementation will be interesting. It’s a lot more than changing the website. And it has damn all to do with a “macho” culture. Lots of companies have macho cultures, but they don’t make like Ryanair. Interestingly, when O’Leary was coping with criticism at its AGM in Dublin last week, his instinctive response was to qualify that word.

“I am very happy to take the blame or responsibility if we have a macho or abrupt culture,” he said. “Some of that may well be my own personal character deformities.”

While O’Leary, a stellar communicator, may be willing to talk about character deformities, the cause of Ryanair being so unloved — while its CEO is hugely popular — does not trace back to such deformities, but to the flawed application of a business model.

What’s distinctive about Ryanair is and always has been its singular focus on costs and its parallel insistence on viewing customers as a commodity, rather than as an assembly of individuals. It’s not clear that the airline trains its front-of-house staff to be rigidly hostile to, and suspicious of, customers, or whether they get those behaviours from the ambient culture, just as they might absorb carcinogens through passive smoking. What is abundantly clear, however, is that perfectly pleasant, even decent, Ryanair employees believe the sky will fall, and fall on them personally, if they divert in the smallest way from the corporate stance that customers are a commodity to be shipped and shouted at. Shipped from A to B and shouted at by that Glasgow moron who barks on about the plane landing on time. Any passenger presenting a variation on this highly efficient regimentation is regarded as a threat to be stifled and squashed. Again, Mr O’Leary’s own words sum it up. “You’re not getting a refund so fuck off,” he has said. “We don’t want to hear your sob stories.”

THE twin implications of comments like this are that rigidity may be the ultimate Ryanair virtue and that the airline is in some way endangered by rotten passengers with sob stories. Certainly, up to now, rigidity has served it well. However, now that so many other airlines are with it or close to it in terms of being cheap, the word is now going out that Ryanair had better be cheap — and a bit more cheerful. The obstacle may be that rigidity.

The essence of good customer care, the characteristic running through every large organisation which provably delivers it, whether that’s Nordstrom in the US or MABS here, is that individuals on the front line know precisely what the procedures of their job are — but also know that in exceptional cases, they have discretion.

They can communicate or act in ways not laid down in the template that works 99% of the time. Absent that discretion, it won’t be possible to train Ryanair staff to improve the airline’s public perception.

Given that discretion, however, they could be trained so that the image is radically changed and O’Leary gets to prove that it’s possible to make money while acting as if you like your customers.

What’s not to like about that prospect?