Tiger Airways: caught by the tail?

Recently, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has fined Tiger Airways A$110,000 as the airline was found guilty of spamming its customers with emails.The decision was made after Tiger Airlines' continued to send emails to its customers despite requests to be removed from their mailing list. The carrier also received numerous warnings from ACMA which, ACMA says it ignored.Responding to the situation, in a statement to Marketing, the Tiger Airways said it "understands that some customers were upset and inconvenienced when they decided to opt out of the service but still continued to receive correspondence after the time period that Australian law requires, and the airline deeply regrets this."Since then, it has "reviewed and re-designed its processes to ensure regulatory compliance". Tiger Airways added  it is working with an independent consultant to assess and make improvements to "all aspects of the electronic direct marketing process where appropriate."However, the damage that it has caused the brand is substantial says experts.According to Paul Hourihane, CEO of Go React such situations are often difficult in nature to salvage."This is a sad story, sad for all concerned. Sad for Tiger's erstwhile customers to have been abused against their expressed wishes. Sad for Tiger that they take a volume marketing approach and wind up in court. It belongs in the 1990s really, which is really sad," he said.Given recent data legislation in Singapore and well established existing data laws in Australia and other markets, best practice has to be adopted straight away, according to Hourihane who added that a clear and concise data and privacy policy link on all e-communications, strict adherence to that policy in terms of unsubscribes, and actual permission to market being recorded for the record, is a must."I would recommend what we call a Get Clean, Stay Clean approach," he said.According to Freda Kwok, lead consultant at Blugrapes, Tiger Airways now runs the risk of being positioned as a brand that is "not transparent" and "insincere" in its marketing and communications which will make consumers wary when interacting with the brand."This will be of a hindrance especially when Tiger Airways is requesting any form of personal information, and future leads acquisition efforts may be marred by cautiousness on the consumers' part," she said.Kwok added that Tiger Airways should have invested in infrastructure to ensure that it has robust enough systems which are sophisticated enough to manage leads effectively and efficiently.However, Kwok also gave the brand the benefit of the doubt. A technical glitch could have occurred where even if customers clicked 'unsubscribe', their records may still be reflected and added every time they submitted their data for a transaction for a ticket, she explained."What Tiger Airways needs to do is to not delete these consumers who have chosen to unsubscribe off their leads management system, but instead retain these details and work with a system that can match this list of consumers against the entire list of addresses whenever something is to be sent out," she added.According to Kwok, the best way to remedy such a situation would be for Tiger to communicate to its customers what it will do to rectify the situation and commit to it.The fine hits Tiger just days after flight restrictions were lifted by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority. Tiger Airways Australia was forced to ground its aircraft for six weeks due to a breach in safety standards.