Arnold on ethical marketing

CHRIS ARNOLD

When you fly on a cheap airline you can expect to be travelling cattle class but that doesn't mean that brands like EasyJet and Ryanair (especially given their profit warnings) can afford to treat customers like cattle. In today's consumer dominated marketplace and credit crunching times, the customer may want cheap prices but still expects to be treated well.

Our railway system may be one of the worse in Europe but it could still teach brands like EasyJet a few things about customer service. I don't usually use blogging as a way to publicly moan but then this piece is all about customer experience and my recent joyless trip on EasyJet wasn't a good one. If I were Andy Harrison (Chief Executive of EasyJet) I'd get a team of customer relationship consultants in very quick.

This is one area they are failing at, given my experience and almost 200 passengers who travelled from Madrid recently. I've always wondered in this modern age why check in desks are so slow? Why have technology if you can't use it? If McDonalds ran check-ins we'd all be through them in seconds not hours. If there's two thing that many pieces of research have told brands it's queuing and lack of information really upsets customers. Especially when they are waiting in stressful situations.

It was this customer insight that motivated the Underground to install the dot matrix system to inform passengers of train arrivals and got Tesco's to put more check outs in. It often pays just to have someone walking about reassuring customers and keeping them informed. Yet with this wisdom freely available, why do so many airlines go one step worse - even their own staff haven't a clue what's going on. Instead you get rumour and passengers soon start to voice their frustrations to each other, just adding fuel to the fire.

I'd planned to use the waiting area to do a survey into attitudes towards flying and the environment but instead all I got was a lot of moaning about customer service. After several hours of having my ear bent all I'd established was that most people agreed that we needed to fly less but somehow they didn't feel part of the problem. Finally, almost 4 hours later, we were on the plane. It's that point when you think, "oh well at least we're on our way home." But there was another problem.

We had one too many passengers. How can that happen with modern computers you may well ask? Well the staff didn't know either. I suspect human error. Now there's a saying that ‘it's not how hard you fall buy how high you bounce'. When a Virgin customer complained that a bag had fallen on his head (through no fault of the airline) Branson rang him up personally and offered him a pair of free flights anywhere in the world. You can imagine the situation in the office, "John, there's a call for you and it's some guy called Richard."

Even if that was a PR stunt it worked, many punters know the story and it's one that gives Virgin a good image. We probably all suspect BA's response would have been less than friendly, whereas Rynair would probably have found a way to charge the customer for the pleasure of getting bashed. Having worked on several airline marketing accounts, including BA, the one thing that makes or breaks a brand is not the advertising or the lure of cheap prices but the customer experience.

A brand isn't a nice colour scheme, typeface and slogan, a brand is what people feel and say about it - reputation is all. And in these times of social networking and blogging, word travels fast (the fact I'm writing to a potential audience of 300,000 proves it). It was Branson who said (referring to BA's big ad spend) "instead of spending millions trying to tell people I have a better airline, I spend my money on making it a better airline. My satisfied customers do the rest."

Branson has always put his customers first - value the customer and they'll value you. It's a good warning to all brands that in these credit crunching times you need to keep focused on the customer. Now with the extra passenger problem solved (no one knew what happened to him) we finally take off. Surprisingly we aren't offered free drinks or food, unlike GNER or National Express who give it free after any major delay (and a refund on your fair).

After much wrangling I finally got a free coffee but having missed my evening meal the only way I was going to get a bite was by paying for it. That option didn't last long. A short while later we're told all the sandwiches have run out so no food. Thank goodness I'd packed an Eat Natural bar, always a life saver. I can't say that there was a lot of enthusiasm from many passengers I spoke to after we landed for flying EasyJet again.

"Easy? it was anything but," commented one irate passenger. The few parents on board were especially frustrated. Yet it would have been so easy to have made them happy customers. In my free copy of the EasyJet in-flight magazine Andy Harrison invites his passengers to write in with suggestions. So I did. That was over a week ago (you can't say I didn't give them a chance to reply). I waited. Two days passed. Four. Six. Eight days...no reply. So much for customer relationship marketing.