Ryanair CMO advises businesses to forget outside consultancies if they want to overhaul CX strategy fast
Ryanair’s chief marketing officer Kenny Jacobs has revealed that the raft of changes to improve the airline’s customer experience over the past six months were made without seeking advice from a consultancy which would have “paralysed” it.
Speaking at The Drum's Joy of CX event in London, he said: “Myself and the chief executive [Michael O’Leary] sat down and looked at what we wanted to do, wrote a page on each, and then just got on with it,” adding it has been the leanest and "most straightforward" approach to business change he has seen in his career, which spans Moneysupermarket.com and Tesco.
“We haven’t been paralysed by consultants who end up going through a 200 page document of what we need to change and we haven’t been bogged down with change management programmes. We’ve really just gotten on with it and that’s the best way to do it,” he added.
Jacobs also suggested this has impacted how quickly its employees across Europe have embraced the changes, saying they want to see leadership in the business “cracking on”.
Discussing the extent to which customer feedback has shaped the improvements, Jacobs explained that for initiatives such as the Business Class service it sought market research, but other changes “have been so bloody obvious” that they didn’t waste time on it.
“You don’t need to do a customer focus group on ‘would you like a second carrier bag for free?’. There are too many business that do too much analysis and just get bogged down. When you know what your brand stands for and know what you want to do you’re better off just getting on with it. So we’re not killing ourselves with market research.”
He also revealed that he will spend a few hours once a week going through individual complaints to pinpoint the areas customers want improvement.
“But there’s a pile of notes on good experiences now which there wasn’t before,” he joked.
Earlier in the year, Jacobs spoke to The Drum about its multi-million pound investment in an innovation lab and aquisition plans.