I'm the sort who'd typically come to the defense of mistreated employees whenever some crass, verbally abusive jackass of a customer starts giving them a hard time. The customer isn't always right. Problems inevitably arise, it's usually not the individual employee's fault, they're just doing their jobs. Having said that, yesterday at Stansted Airport my student Beth Heywood and I experienced an "interactional service failure" with a certain airline representative and if the world didn't frown upon such things, I'd have gladly inflicted catastrophic damage upon this woman.
To borrow a line from Robert Louis Stevenson, killing being out of the question, I'm doing the next best in this post. Beth and I told her "we could and would make such a scandal out of this, as should make her name stink from one end of London to the other. If she had any friends or any credit, we undertook that she should lose them." (Well not so much those exact words really but something with a similarly vindictive flavour.) Now this particular airline, which shall go unnamed, but to give this post a certain readability I'll simply refer to as Ryanair, which we can also pretend is based in Dublin, is notorious for its appalling customer service practices - including charging disabled passengers for use of its wheelchairs and providing neither an 800 telephone number nor email address for contacting them for complaints but instead only a premium rate call service - and which The Economist remarked had a "deserved reputation for nastiness." (The businessman sitting next to me said he'd overheard an employee of theirs referring to us passengers as "self-loading cargo.")
The truth is I'd been warned against using Ryanair, but when my secretary booked this flight from Belfast City to Stansted I thought to myself, honestly, how bad can they be? People are just overreacting. As passengers we've grown accustomed to being pampered; it's a budget airline so a compromise in service for low cost and timely flights - which Ryanair boasts having - is probably justifiable. But boy was I wrong.
It takes a lot for me to lose my temper, so if you can picture me, normally so quiet, shy and reserved that I'm often asked to repeat myself, standing in a crowded queue and heckling this vile blonde employee who'd offended me, you'll get a sense of just how furious I'd become. What did she do that was so bad? She and a colleague snarkily responded to our initially innocent, smiling request for help (I'd misplaced my confirmation number, which I'd never needed for any other airline since it's easily enough located by a swipe of my passport or credit card from the electronic kiosk) by telling me to get in line with all of the others who'd similarly neglected to print out their tickets, a line two hundred passengers deep, moving at a snail's pace, and which clearly would have me miss my flight home - where incidentally my dogs were busy tearing up the house. She added coldly that it would cost me £4 to retrieve this confirmation number and it was required for check-in.
Now maybe it was the fact that I'd woken up at 5am that morning to catch my flight and was still digesting a dubious ham and cheese croissant from the train station, or maybe I was suffering from my typical sugar free Red Bull withdrawal, or perhaps I was still drowsy with ill-deserved delusions of grandeur from sitting at High Table at Cambridge the evening before (an interesting experience I'll save for another post) and operating with a bloated sense of self-importance - probably some combination of all of these things, I suspect. Still, I'd not been expecting such a bristly response and such a scandalous practice of Ryanair imposing additional hidden costs on its customers. When I said, still smiling, but growing moodier by the minute, that seems unfair to me, they responded: "You wouldn't go on a bus without your ticket now, would you, Sir?" Um, apparently you're missing the idea of an ‘electronic ticket' I said, but alas they'd built up a rehearsed script against all such complaints, we were but cattle to them, and soon enough I found myself cursing them under my breath and huffing off to join all the other poor saps in line (Beth, if you're wondering, meanwhile headed on to the gate, since she was much more prepared than I and had printed off her confirmation number).
Ryanair is the type of company that, when you're burned and so tell them you'll never be using their services again, has its employees respond, eh, who cares, you're only one person, plenty more suckers out there. So there I am, standing in line fuming with all of these other passengers, most of them exhausted, disgruntled, and anxiously looking at their watches, when this same cur of a customer service agent starts barking out names for a flight to Dublin, which is about to leave. "What about Belfast?" I shouted out. The woman, if you could call her that, clearly heard me, eyeing me as one of those difficult customers from before. She proceeded to completely ignore me. Charming. I asked about the Belfast flight so many times she nastily responded "I heard you" and trotted off to a coworker where they started giggling about God knows what, probably eating babies and torturing puppies. Not only did I wish on her miserable and vulgar existence everlasting torment and suffering at that instant - and if you're wondering if I mean that, I really, really do - I endeavoured to get her name one way or the other and ruin her career.
But there was no time. I barely made my flight as it was, though actually I weighed over in my head whether it was worth missing my flight just so I could stay and track down her identity. Soon enough I noticed how my passionate hatred of this one person, this nasty, horrible woman, had generalised to everybody I saw wearing a Ryanair uniform - the perky and slightly clueless gate agent, the otherwise friendly flight crew, even the stereotypically salt-and-pepper headed, coffee drinking pilots. In the back of my mind they were all in cahoots with her. Intellectually I could differentiate one person from the next, and I knew that there were probably decent, if somewhat naïve, people somewhere in that Pinto of the sky company. But emotionally this one bad apple tainted my perception of everyone associated with the airline.
Retail managers and business owners take heed. There's ample psychological research demonstrating precisely this effect: If your customers feel rudely, condescendingly or dismissively treated by even one of your frontline employees, you're likely to lose their patronage (and of course their money) forever. In the emotionally flooded minds of your customers, that pompous, arrogant waiter is your restaurant; that eye-rolling, vacuous teenager behind the counter is your store; that rude or forgetful secretary is your company. In my case, I will do my part, as I hope you'll do yours, to spread the word that Ryanair is the worst airline currently in operation in all of Europe, all because this one employee in Stansted treated me and other passengers like scum. She's just one customer service agent among many that this company, as another penny-scrimping tactic, failed to train on the importance of being polite.
