How To Handle Constructive Criticism Like A 5 Year Old Child

March 1, 2009
Estimated reading time:
1 minute

I'm not an expert on web design, or coding, or hosting, and I'm not an expert on social media, marketing, business or management.

However, even I can see that this probably isn't the way to go about talking to someone who discovered a minor flaw in your website.

A staff member for Ryanair decided it would be a good idea, when someone gave them a bit of feedback, to call them "an idiot and a liar", before going on to belittle the fact that the blogger was using Wordpress (like over 200,000 other people have done today) and suggesting that he wasn't very good at his job.

And, the icing on the bad publicity cake: the official statement from Ryanair.

"Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again."Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel."

A simple email to the guy who wrote it saying "thanks for pointing out the error, we've reported it to our IT team and they're working on it" would have taken what, 30 seconds? Sounds like a much better idea than shouting at people that disagree with you and then deciding that whatever customers you have left should probably have to pay for using the toilet. Not the best way to create customer loyalty, is it?

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