Customer Service

1. Executive summary

We have just being appointed as the Services Management team of Ryanair. Just before we start, we would like to say that we are delighted with the opportunity of working in this project as this subject is of interest of us.

The low-cost-carriers industry is characterized by organisations that offer lower fares. In order to sustain the revenue loss associated with a low cost model, the comfort is taken, and extra fees might be charged, as luggage, priority boarding, food, etc.

The first company to operate in the low-cost-carriers industry was Southwest Airlines (1971), and the same model was later adopted by Ryanair, which has been in the market since 1985.

Known by its cheap flights, and claiming to be the most punctual airline amongst Lufthansa, Air France, British Airways, Aerlingus, Iberia and EasyJet; Ryanair offers the largest range of destinations in Europe among those competitors. However, improvement is required in terms of communications, website, customer orientation, and the culture of the company.

At Ryanair’s Annual General Meeting, held on the 20th of September, 2013 Shareholders were highly concerned about “Ryanair's shares tumbling on profits warning” (Thomas, N. 2013) and the main issue is the failure in its customer Service Delivery.

The objective of this report is to analyse our critical current service offering based on a services gap analysis and make recommendations for improvement after analyzing our service characteristic.

2. Distinctive characteristics of service operations

* Customer Participation in the Process

The customer participation refers to the way customers are involved in the process. In the service industry, the customers play a big role in the process and, how they feel about it, and their knowledge about the service/product can influence the customer experience.

The customer participation in the process, on Ryanair, includes: the booking, at the website, the check-in, the boarding, and disembarking.

The website is proven to be a big failure as ease of use for the customers’ point of view, being an exhaustive experience from the searching of a flight till the purchase moment. That start could influence the whole experience.

Also the “Macho Culture” of the company, which is, sometimes, reflected on the staff, can be a great barrier for the customer participation. As it is already implied that the customer, when experiencing a new service, will not be aware of the processes of a firm, the way the customer is led by the company and its staff could disturb the customer participation process.

Every contact Ryanair has with customers is called “Moment of truth”, and