Ryanair Customer Trends

At the forefront of the airline industry, the top competitors have retained their status by constantly offering new services and benefits for their customers. To attract business and retain a loyal customer base, it is necessary to first identify the needs and wants of a target market before instituting changes which reflect the desires of the customer. Relatively recent developments in the airline industry include booking flights and purchasing tickets online.

To this end, Ryanair, a discount airline which offers cheap flights all over Europe, has implemented a program suite called WebTrends to analyze website visitor behavior. Using this program, Ryanair will be able to identify visitor trends across its European sites, which are offered in 19 different languages, and improve the quality of their website based on data reflected in these trends.

Ryanair will have the necessary tools to understand the different preferences of each country’s web visitors, and customize advertisements and campaigns accordingly for different countries. In an industry that is quickly taking advantage of the internet, analyzing website visitor behavior is crucial should Ryanair want to remain competitive. WebTrends on Demand, part of the analytics suite, presents the results of the data in a graphic user interface, and categorizes data based on the country from which it came. The interface is customizable and allows the operator to choose which data to look for and include in the report.

Webtrends Visitor Data Mart includes an “Interest Profile” that references a customer’s online actions with their offline data such as demographic information. The insight provided by this program is invaluable in improving independent marketing strategies individually focused on a variety of demographics.

It is hard to stay competitive in any service-based industry without consulting programs like Webtrends to recognize trends in your customer base. Customer feedback is important for any company to attain customer satisfaction. Oftentimes companies will seek feedback through surveys or polls. Webtrends allows Ryanair to gain insight into their customers’ activities, avoiding the route of contacting them for something like a survey. The ability to monitor such information without consulting the client is cost-effective and convenient for the customer.

A potential downside to this program manifests itself in the possibility that trends in customer website activity may only reflect the actions of online customers, rather than what customers would like to see implemented. The connection between the current website activity and what the customer would like to be able to do on the website may be too attenuated for Ryanair to turn around and effectively implement a change for the better. In this case, it is probably best to supplement WebTrends’ data gathering with a customer satisfaction page for questions, comments, and recommendations.

The perceived benefits of this program, however, certainly outweigh the potential shortcomings, and using it correctly will surely decrease marketing costs in the long run, as well as increase marketing return on investments and provide a narrower marketing focus on select targeted groups.

Matt Girandola

http://www.breakingtravelnews.com/news/article/btn20051214120142205/

http://intelligent-enterprise.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=AMQXRKHWIGDUPQE1GHRSKHWATMY32JVN?articleID=199700517