Editor’s note: Did you know that KLM guarantees a reply to every tweet within 60 minutes? And @DeltaAssist will reply to all tweets within 10 mins and resolve your issue within 24 hours? How do they provide such customer service online? To answer these questions, we asked the super-exuberant Jenn Seeley from Radian6 to shed some light on the issues through a guest post.

Jenn is a Community Engagement Specialist at Radian6 in the worlds of travel & aviation. She loves take-offs, landings and in-flight snacks. You can tweet with her @jenn_seeley as she welcomes sharing and engaging.

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Many airlines have boarded the social media plane for managing customer service  – some are just taking off at greater speeds than others. What can you do to ensure your airline is soaring higher than ever and delivering the service your customers dream of? Let’s break it down in five easy steps!
Always begin with a plan!
So, you can see your customers from time to time talking about you online. You hear them loud and clear. However, projects without a strategy can be a waste of efforts, energy and resources. Sure, you are going to want to reach out and fix every issue you …

SimpliFlying is back with the  Monthly Twitter Report for airlines (in partnership with Eezeer) for August 2011 in continuation with our coverage and analysis of the dynamic social media landscape for airlines.
After close to 6 months of reporting monthly on how airlines are using Twitter, we can safely say that apart from Facebook, Twitter is the social media platform of choice for most airlines. The number of tweets sent and received has been rising in general for months in a row. Airlines have also become more forthcoming as well as responsive.
This month, while the usual suspects (Delta and JetBlue) are once again on the list of top engagers, Cebu Pacific absolutely storms into the list. Not only is it placed second on the list of airlines receiving the most number of public tweets, it also scores the highest in the Global Satisfaction Score with a score of 106.7. (For more details, see the infographic.)
A number of facts are immediately clear from this report:

As we’ve mentioned, Cebu Pacific is second on the list of airlines receiving the most number of public tweets with more than 11,000 to its name. However, Delta Air Lines is once …

Well, well, well! This year’s race for the 2nd SimpliFlying Awards for Excellence in Social Media is heating up like never before. Our awards are not just featured on the homepages of Malaysia Airlines and Air New Zealand but have gained huge traction on the web as well. Just about a week into voting, the total number of votes has already crossed 12,000!

Votes, as we mentioned in the previous slide-deck on the Best Airlines Driving Revenue through Social Media, have come from around 2500 cities across the world. We promised recently that we’d regularly post case-packs illustrating the fabulous campaigns that have led the final nominees to be shortlisted. And we’re back this time with another 5 great case-studies on how 5 of the best airlines in the world have used social media to drive Customer Service and Crisis Management.

This would be a good time to remind you that voting is still ongoing so you can vote for your favorite airline until 15th September. Do vote if you care about the airline you love! Meanwhile, you can check out the latest result for the current category below.

Best use of social …

Update: The article now includes two bonus points, specifically addressing Hurricane Irene! (thanks to Vinay Bhaskara for those)

On August 27, 2011, Hurricane Irene hit the US East Coast, all the way up to New York City! Just prior to that, on August 23rd, an earthquake measuring 5.8 on the Richter Scale hit the US east coast. It shook the nation’s Capital and was felt strongly in New York but luckily not many were hurt. It happened just hours after the strongest earthquake in Colorado in 40 years, and one in Colombia. Airports in NYC, DC, Virginia were shut down and power and cellphone lines cut. So while people couldn’t make calls or receive them, they could send text messages, tweet, post on Facebook and in other social networks and fuel all kinds of hot debates.

We reached out to our partner, Philippe Scheimann from SOSTravelers.com and asked him for a guest article on what to do in such a situation, when a crisis hits a region not well prepared to deal with it. Hence, here is the guest article by Philippe, which provides Top 10 tips on what to do if you’re stuck at an airport after …

Social technologies are gaining huge traction among airlines. There’s simply no denying it. A couple of months ago, we released an infographic that showed how airlines are dedicating resources to social media. Most major airlines, according to the infographic, already have social media teams in place – most are managing cross-departmental strategies. Some even have plans to expand their teams later this year. That infographic was deemed to be a truly important one as far as the topic of airlines in social media was concerned: it received over 100,000 views and was featured in a number of publications including twice on Mashable itself!
Make sense of the chaos
Now, to add to all the hullaballoo, it really doesn’t help that social technologies are not just adding newer features regularly, but new social technologies themselves are being launched a dime a dozen (any takers for Google+ in airlines?).

So if you’re an airline marketer and thinking really hard about which social technologies to adopt apart from the usual suspects, we have the perfect remedy for your troubles. In fact, even if you’ve figured out which social platforms to adopt, you might still be wondering how best to use them or …

Editor’s Note: A day before I spoke about putting the joy back into the airport experience at the Annual ACI Conference in Lisbon, Philippe Scheimann from SOSTravelers.com suggested that he wanted to write a guest article as a follow up to his earlier ‘How to empower stranded travelers‘. We decided that that the next article could be on how to help airports turn stranded travelers into happy consumers. Hence, here is the guest article by Philippe.

This is a very challenging question since, by definition, stranded travelers are in a difficult situation, often far away from home, in a difficult environment where uncertainty is high. Stranded travelers are usually left on their own, airport and airline officials have often no answer to provide because of the inherent uncertain nature of the event and are limited in what they can do to help travelers at a loss for helping the travelers.

The following items may not work for everyone, everywhere. However, they show various directions that will need to be customized and modified according to the specifications of the location, the needs of the travelers and various other parameters.

Let us assume several assumptions to start with:

We are talking about stranded …

Last week, had the honor of presenting at the ACI Europe Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. While the city had beautiful weather, I addressed the audience of mainly airport CEOs and Commercial Heads on how to engage customers when the weather goes bad – in times of crises. I used a number of examples, from the Icelandic ashcloud to American Airlines flight 24 crises handling.

Here’s the presentation I delivered in Lisbon, the key point being that airlines and airports must use the same tools as their customers to communicate effectively and efficiently today.
 

Social Media Crises Management for airlines and airport on Prezi

In summary, I think here’s a picture that tells us what the future of crises management in aviation is going to be like (thanks to Aurelie Valtat for …

Delta Airlines landed in some hot soup early June 2011 when they charged $2800 to US soldiers returning from a mission, for excess bags. According to policy, three bags are allowed to be checked in free for soldiers traveling Economy Class, and the fourth bag for each of the 34 soldiers had to be checked-in.

While the soldiers would have been re-imbursed the amount, the charges obviously upset them and they posted a video on Youtube shot in-flight, which hit 200,000 views in a few hours. The issue was covered on mainstream media, and received an angry emotional outburst from thousands over Twitter and community forums.
In the end, Delta Airlines relented by posting on their blog that the charges will be refunded and policy changed. They still kept getting angry comments on their blog.

So we’ve now done an independent analysis of the situation, mentioning the key facts, analyzing the tweets (using a cool sentiment analysis tool). We also assessed Delta’s response to the crises management framework we released after the ashcloud last year. And we’ve shared it all in the slide deck below for your benefit….

Yes, you read it right – Fred Taylor doesn’t work in the Customer Service Deptartment at Southwest Airlines – he works with the Proactive Customer Service – and that makes a pretty big difference, as you’ll realize in the interview we managed to grab with him recently.
Who is Fred Taylor?
Keeping a finger on the pulse of Southwest Airlines’ daily operations and making sure their Internal and External Customers are on the same page is a way of life for Fred Taylor. As the Senior Manager of Proactive Customer Service Communications, Fred is charged with shepherding a unique approach that has its roots firmly embedded in one of the Company’s Core Values—The Golden Rule. Fred and his Proactive Customer Service (PCS) Team of four are responsible for coordinating timely information, guidance, and support during disruptions of Southwest’s scheduled service.

Working with 14 other departments, the PCS Team explores new ways Southwest can operate more efficiently; provide more-effective communications; and implement better Customer accommodations.

To Fred, being proactive means practicing what you preach. As such, through effective internal and external communication/action, Fred and his Team helps Southwest Airlines prudently …

As Twitter celebrates its fifth birthday amidst much fanfare, replete with revelation of details about its early days, we thought it apt to analyze and publish the best Twitter initiatives by airlines. Along with Facebook (on which we did a Top 10 last month), Twitter holds forte as the “go-to” social media platform for most businesses looking to engage their customers.

Airlines are no different. A recent infographic, analyzed here on SimpliFlying, showed that more than 180 airlines are now using Twitter. Amidst this melee, however, quite understandably, some airlines have done better than others in understanding and mastering Twitter as a tool for driving business goals. The case-studies included in the following presentation illustrate some outstanding examples of how airlines have driven revenue, engagement, loyalty, crisis management and customer service via Twitter.

While Twitter is primarily seen as a fantastic customer service and engagement tool due to the instant, real-time responses that can be sent out to customers, it has also proved remarkably helpful in handling crises.

However, with almost every recognizable airline now on Twitter, new challenges have arisen. Airline executives handling social media for their airline should now think about answers to …