SimpliFlying has been talking about the inevitable evolution, if not revolution, in airline/airport customer service following the increase in social media usage by travelers. Today, we’re glad to say that the revolution is finally here. Customer service 2.0 is now a stark reality, and should soon be a pressing need for airlines and airports the world over. Let’s begin by introducing a young lady from AirAsia previously featured in our Customer Service Top 10 who’s at the forefront of this immense change.

 
She’s little, she’s a miss, and she’s red… care to guess who she is?

She’s Lil’ Miss Red, and she’s Air Asia’s Customer Service “ambassador” as well as the core element of the AskAirAsia customer service website.  From now on she will also increasingly become the Air Asia customer service agent as the airline has announced that it will close two of its customer service hotlines in a move towards what it calls its “on-going mission… to utilize technology and practice cost efficiency as well as promoting full automation and self service via the airline’s online channels”.

Although it might seem as just another cost-cutting measure, the …

Note: After Shashank’s webinar on the importance of performing customer-service on social media last week, he received a number of questions from attendees who wanted to understand the specifics better. Some of the most relevant questions are answered below for the benefit of our readership. You can view the entire webinar here.

Q: We have a number of customers complaining in social after not being satisfied with care over the phone. How can we make those people happy?

A: Firstly, apologize to them and see if you can rectify the situation on social media. Secondly, trace the call center rep who dealt with this person to ensure this doesn’t happen again. One of our clients ran a Facebook contest recently, and when the winner called the hotline to claim his prize, the call center rep insisted that the airline didn’t even had a Facebook page, but only a website! You’d want to ensure these incidences never happen twice.

For the future, it is better to work with a social-media enabled call center – such as those offered by InterGlobe Technologies – where call center reps are trained to handle queries on social media as well. Hence, offering a seamless experience …

Note: On April 12, Shashank Nigam, the CEO of SimpliFlying, presented a webinar on Customer Service hosted by Radian6. This article is modified from Radian6′s summary of the webinar. We present here some highlights from the session followed by the full webinar. You can read the original post here.

 
Customer service is real-time
Through social media, customer service has gone real-time and the expectation is now 24/7. Airline customers are turning to social media as another customer service channel. In fact, per Shashank, 71.4% of consumers’ tweets to the airlines are customer service related. Voice calls into customer service centers are projected to decline this year and there are cases where social conversations numbers are equal to voice call numbers.

With this increase in social media customer service traffic, consumer expectations have become more real-time. When asked about satisfaction levels through these new channels, Shashank sees that consumers are pleased to feel acknowledged even if the resolution is not immediate. While some of the top US Airlines are still well over an hour, the top two have their average response times to less than 15 minutes.
(see the entire infographic by Eezeer …

While air travel is one of the safest mode of transportation, emergencies do occur sometimes and on April 15, 2012, a Royal Brunei Airlines flight had a hiccup. Here’s what was posted on the airline’s blog about the incident:
Royal Brunei Airlines Boeing 777-200 flight number BI098, from Dubai to Bandar Seri Begawan, on 15 April 2012, made a precautionary landing in Mumbai, India following an aircraft system alert ‘AFT Cargo Fire’ that necessitated the flight to be diverted to the nearest airport at that time.  BI098 landed safely at Mumbai at 19:24 (GMT +5:30). Royal Brunei Airlines can confirm that no passengers were injured.

Flawless crises management, supported by social media
While such a statement and a press release is only to be expected after any incident, their blog, Facebook page and Twitter account was not just abuzz with regular updates, there was ample two-way interaction too.

First, generic updates were put out, then messages directed toward the stranded passengers were posted and then once relatives of passengers learnt that’s where they could get the latest information, the airline staff …

Crises in the Air Transport industry come in many shapes and forms but they usually have three things in common: 1) no prior notice or warning signs, 2) the need to inform large numbers of people in a very short time and 3) a large number of (increasingly digital) angry/distressed people.

However, regardless of whether the crisis is something the airline did to itself , an uncontrollable natural phenomenon or a strike, there is always a need to reach large numbers of people as quickly as possible, providing information, answering their questions and avoiding the spread of false rumors.

In today’s increasingly connected world, social media has proven to be the crisis management tool, and has been used successfully by both airlines and airports in a wide range of scenarios. The reason for its effectiveness is based on two factors: the first is that it allows the kind of mass communication and information dissemination that we mentioned earlier, and the second is that they are the place where an increasing percentage of users go to complain and seek information.

At SimpliFlying we’ve accumulated a wealth of experience consulting in social-media based crisis management strategies for both airlines and airports …

Even though it seems like yesterday, our popular top 10 initiative has reached its first birthday and we’ve decided to celebrate it with a king-size slide deck featuring the best case studies from our past top 10s.

This top 50 has been designed not only to celebrate the first birthday of the SimpliFlying’s Top 10s but also to provide our readers with a unique downloadable resource that features what we think are the very best marketing initiatives put forward by airlines and airports over the past few years.
An idea-generating tool
However we do not wish this top 50 to be a sort of “museum” of past initiatives but rather a tool for airline professionals to generate new ideas. We hope that by viewing such a wide variety of outstanding initiatives in a single slide deck, other marketers will be inspired to create other new and innovative campaigns that will form the basis of future SimpliFlying Top 10s.

You will notice that each case study has a category indicator before its title. These indicators refer to the original top 10 that featured that particular case study, and have been included  to facilitate further research into the subject.
A year of top 10s
The list below provides links …

The past year has been an interesting and very successful one for Simpliflying with a number of new client acquisitions and tons of exciting free resources such as infographics and Top 10 case-packs posted regularly to the blog amongst other things. At the brink of the new year, we relive ten of the most popular articles on SimpliFlying in 2011:

10. Social seating: Have you read about the Malaysian Airline initiative that led the airline to create a much talked about Facebook booking engine that allowed people to sit with their friends on the airline’s flights?

9. Airports in social media: In the ninth place we have a Top 10 case-pack, an initiative helmed by our Senior Innovation Officer Shubhodeep Pal, on how airports have driven engagement trough social media.

8. Blockbuster social initiative: Next, in 8th place we find one, if not the, most successful social media campaigns of 2011, the AA Advantage “mystery miles” campaign that hit the headlines in February by achieving an 84 fold growth of its Facebook fans in 54 hours.

7. Airline Twitter initiatives: In the seventh place we find …

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by our partner, Philippe Scheimann from SOSTravelers.com on what to do in a situation where  you’re stranded while traveling during Thanksgiving. The article provides tips on what to do if you’re stuck and still want to carry on your travel plans.

Thanksgiving is happening this week in the US. Thanksgiving day is a historic tradition of celebrating with family, friends, food, and giving thanks for all the good we have in our lives.

Hence, this is one of the busiest period for traveling, especially this holiday is concentrated within a few days so that there is not much room for flexibility.

Let us review the various tips the SOStravelers team has gathered around the Web as well as our own tips.

Preparation – Before leaving
1. Book your tickets now / yesterday

Well, if you have not done so yet, you will have to be very creative to find some solutions online or have your travel agent work extra hours!

2. Look into alternate airports & Ditch connections

If your favorite airport does not provide you with some solutions, you may as well look around, even drive for several hours and get a seat in a flight from another …

Yes, we gave an award to Qantas for their work with handling the Chilean volcanic ash crises through social media last month, at SimpliFlying Awards for Social Media Excellence. And when you win an award, you should be expected to do more of  the same things better. But it looks like Qantas is attracting social media crises these days like bees to honey!

After causing lots of unhappiness amongst passengers due to the complete fleet being grounded, and then getting some more flak for lack of pro-active response through social media, a simple Twitter contest backfired completely today for the battered airline brand.

The contest was meant to highlight creative aspects of the luxury offered in the premium cabins at Qantas, but it only took an hour for the #QantasLuxury hashtag to trend as passengers and Australia in general vented their frustrations with tweets. Over 51 tweets were being received per minute on the hashtag, and soon mainstream press covered it too.

While we’ve compiled here a number of key tweets and messages in the crises as it unrolled, we’d like to ponder about some questions too:

What could …

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by our partner, Philippe Scheimann from SOSTravelers.com on what to do in a situation where Twitter is down and you’re stranded. The article provides Top 10 tips on what to do if you’re stuck and still want to carry on your travel plans.

In previous articles published in collaboration with SimpliFlying (see crisis management section) and at SOStravelers.com, we have shown how Twitter can be very useful if you get stuck in an airport or in some remote place because of an earthquake or various other reasons.

Thanks to Twitter, you may be able to connect to your airline company, become a follower, send and receive direct messages. It may actually be faster than waiting in line to talk with an airline rep who may not be updated with all the current information.

Twitter also allows you to get information from reliable sources as well as connect with other people who are willing to help (use #getmehome..).
At SOStravelers, we very much use Twitter and like to help stranded travelers who tweet for help (see our first story).

However, it happened and unfortunately it will happen again: you try to send a tweet, connect to …