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 …

JetBlue has established itself so firmly as a star in social media that it needs no introduction. Unsurprisingly, they were voted to the first position in the April round of SimpliFlying Heroes, receiving an overwhelming 82% of the votes. We reached out to Morgan Johnston, who heads JetBlue’s social efforts, and he most kindly obliged us with some tidbits about JetBlue’s social media efforts.

JetBlue’s first jump into social media was after the ice-storm of February 2007 when they needed to address their customers to talk to them about lessons learned from an operational failure. They made the decision to address customers directly through YouTube and learned very quickly that establishing a direct relationship with customers through these channels was appreciated – and also provided an invaluable resource to learn more.

 
On the road to greatness
When Twitter began to gain additional prominence in March, JetBlue recognised the opportunity of the real-time nature of the medium. Because users were posting their experiences as they happened, the airline could talk with them as they were travelling. This offered amazing customer …

“We live in an extremely dynamic environment… None of us on this [podcast] and potentially anyone listening knew what the hell Pinterest was a year ago”

With these words Vueling’s CEO, Alex Cruz, responded to a question on the Spanish airline’s future social marketing strategy during this month’s Simplifying Podcast that featured him as a guest.

 

In keeping with our usual format, the podcast is composed of a 10 min introductory section where we take a look at  the latest trends in aviation followed by a 25 min interview with our guest, Vueling’s CEO Alex Cruz.

In today’s introductory section we review the importance of response times in social media and the ongoing debate over in-flight Wi-Fi and its different business model. During the interview with Alex we analyzed the following subjects:

Critical factors behind Vueling’s success (11:30)
Spanish market : The collapse of Spanair, high speed railways and Iberia’s new low cost subsidiary (13:40)
Vueling’s Spanglish advertising and its cloud (22:00)
Strategy: Hybrid, but only if cost leader (24:42)
Vueling’s marketing channels (26:50)
Alex Cruz’s view on social media (28:40)
Social media ROI for Vueling (29:50)
Rapid fire round (35:00)

(After you fill out the short form below, …

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 …

Editor’s Note: Here’s another guest post by Peter Claridge of Unmetric, an exclusive aviation partner of SimpliFlying. Unmetric is a social media benchmarking company that helps brands analyse how well they’re doing on social media by including in-depth insights into numerous metrics as well as information on what kind of content “works” and how competitors are faring. Among Unmetric’s list of illustrious clients are Citibank, Nestlé and AirTel.

In many respects, Facebook takes the limelight when it comes to looking at how an airline is engaging with the community. However, over the past couple of years Twitter has inadvertently become the public helpdesk for brands around the world. Many airlines have been quick to establish a presence here to ensure that where ever there are questions and praise (and to some extent, complaints) a representative is there is respond in 140 characters.

US airlines, like many other US brands, have been quick to build their Twitter teams and are blazing a trail for many other global airlines to follow. SimpliFlying and Unmetric decided to dig a little deeper using the Unmetric platform to see if there is a clear leader or whether all airlines are doing a similar job. We collected and analyzed the …

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 …

First, a bit of history. Social seating goes back a long time at SimpliFlying. We were actually the first to point out that choosing potential seating partners via an intelligent social seating system in an airplane would ultimately go mainstream – that was a product powered by our good friends at Satisfly. This was way back in 2009 – almost three years ago! Then in 2010, we discussed incorporating social media in the flying experience – and showcased Twitter seating charts.

Then, last year, there were significant indications of things to come with Malaysia Airlines allowing customers to sit next to their Facebook friends. However, a couple of months ago KLM announced that they would launch the first “truly” social seating system for airlines matching customer’s social profiles with those having similar profiles or interests.

So far, given the lack of details about how the system would exactly work, the announcement was both welcomed as well as met with trepidation by the online community. Some claimed they’d love to try this new system, saying that it would spare them long hours of boredom …

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 …