ryanair-flying

As one of the top airlines in Europe Ryanair’s success as has been attributed to keeping operating costs low, use of innovative technology and maintaining a strong brand image. As a part of their new customer service lead strategy Ryanair has continually invested in keeping passengers informed at critical times in the passenger journey and has benefited with a significant improvement in brand image and passenger growth, Flightbuddy has been an integral part of that strategy.

In 2011 Ryanair identified that an automated flight disruption system was needed to provide timely, accurate information to customers about their flight. This development would also allow Ryanair to better comply with the requirements of EU Regulation 261 - Air Passenger Rights.

Ryanair needed an elegant automated solution to generate the large numbers of personalised communications through SMS and email channels during disruptions. Sentient were engaged in 2012 to address a requirement for delivering basic delay SMS messages to passengers in multiple languages, this became the core of the Flightbuddy platform. With many years experience in proactive customer contact Sentient evolved that SMS platform to what is now Flightbuddy.

As EU Regulation 261 imposed new demands on airlines, the customer service team in Ryanair were the most immediate beneficiaries, Flightbuddy dramatically reduced the effort and time required to deal with significant disruption. The downstream benefits were that calls to customer service lines and support request emails also reduced. Direct feedback from passengers was very positive as customers felt better informed.

The system has dealt with numerous disruptions including severe weather and ATC strikes where up to over 600 flights were cancelled or delayed and thousands of passengers affected.

Ryanair continues to work closely with Sentient to add valuable functionality to the service including meal voucher authorisation and a complaint case management module. What most impressed the Ryanair team is the easy user interface and backup and support from the Sentient team.

As one of the top airlines in Europe Ryanair’s success as has been attributed to keeping operating costs low, use of innovative technology and maintaining a strong brand image. As a part of their new customer service lead strategy Ryanair has continually invested in keeping passengers informed at critical times in the passenger journey and has benefited with a significant improvement in brand image and passenger growth, Flightbuddy has been an integral part of that strategy.

Flightbuddy integrates with the Ryanair NewSkies (Navitaire) booking system using a secure API, retrieving the flight status from the Netline flight management system.

Ryanair Quotes

“Flightbuddy is a great product, it allows us to keep our customers updated in real time regarding the status of their delayed flight automating previously manual processes and ensuring consistency of treatment and regulatory compliance on all disrupted flights. Sentient are responsive and attentive to our changing needs and the support is excellent.”
“My team use the flightbuddy dashboard daily, at a glance we can see how the day is going , if we are hitting our punctuality targets and which airports are experiencing issues.”
“My team use Flightbuddy to manage day to day customer service communications with passengers, it is well designed and easy to use, the training requirements were minimal and the user interface intuitive.”

Key Benefits

  • Reduced staff requirements to manage disruptions
  • Searchable and complete archive of passenger communications
  • Comprehensive view of delay/cancellation events in one system
  • Airport handlers are forewarned of delays cancellations and diversions