Budget airline Ryanair is scrambling to recover from a customer experience nightmare this week. Over 315,000 people’s journeys were disrupted due to an error with pilot’s annual leave. Ryanair Chief Executive Michael O’Leary had offered to pay pilot’s over £10,000 to waive 10 days annual leave and come back to work, an offer that was declined by the majority of pilots.
A cancellation crisis that affects this level of customers can prove difficult for a company to bounce back from. We used our customer experience analytics tool Emotics, using Emotion AI, to measure the feelings behind customer commentary online.
We analysed over 3,000 tweets mentioning Ryanair to uncover the key emotions and main themes driving these emotions. Our analysis shows a spike in anger and sadness following the announcement with an Adorescore* of 14.
High levels of anger were driven by mentions of passengers losing money on flights and missing important personal events due to cancellations.
https://twitter.com/WaltonArchie/status/910236844075438080
https://twitter.com/StephenMcIner82/status/910911802271289344
@Ryanair Outward and return flight delayed significantly. With return flight: delayed so much missed last train. Stranded train station 😡
— Matthew Jenkins (@TOPIC1993) September 17, 2017
The Adorescore would have been a lot lower due to joy being driven by Twitter users joking about the blunder and sharing GiFs and memes about Ryanair’s mess up.
Ryanair HR right now… pic.twitter.com/EAZkKrwb6z
— Jack (@JackRalston) September 21, 2017
Fellow Irish airline Aer Lingus used Ryanair’s pain for their gain with this campaign below.
We don’t want to see anyone grounded this October, so we've extended our #HappyWinter Sale! https://t.co/8jQHW76TiW pic.twitter.com/ONcrmJDakw
— Aer Lingus (@AerLingus) September 20, 2017
With the cancellation crisis still ongoing the full impact on Ryanair’s customer experience is unknown. We can be sure that Michael O’Leary and his customer service team will be busy over the coming days trying to reduce the damage caused to brand Ryanair.
To find out more or to schedule a demo of our Emotics software, please contact us.
*The Adorescore is a high level performance indicator of how content or a brand is doing on an Index of -100 to +100. A high score means the content is largely positive in nature containing positive emotions such as joy, trust & amazement. A negative score would indicate mostly negative emotions expressed within the content such as rage, loathing and fear.
