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 shift from a telephone-based to a social media and internet-based model will most likely be an inevitable one for most airlines (and even airports). The speed and extent to which airlines will embrace the new model will obviously vary depending on business models, but a deep rooted shift in customer expectations is undoubtedly underway, and it all began with…

Eyjafjallajökull, of course!

If there ever was a perfect wake up call for airlines to engage in social media the ash-filled roar of the famous (and unpronounceable) Icelandic volcano was it, at least for Europe. The disruption caused by airspace closures and its unpredictable behavior proved to both airline and airports that traditional channels were simply unfit to handle large crises in an increasingly social world.

It became evident that, while traditional call centers were collapsed, users on Twitter and Facebook were helping each other and the European Air Traffic Control Agency (Eurocontrol) was providing them with up to date information in an efficient and relatively effortless manner.

New Rules of Engagement

As our CEO Shashank Nigam noted in a recent webinar, with the rise of social media, consumers now expect to receive answers and immediate attention 24/7 on their online platform of choice. In this new environment social media is becoming a must for airlines, and while some are still struggling, others, like Delta, are already managing to answer over 4000 queries a month with an average response times of as little as 11 minutes.

Furthermore, as our latest SimpliFlying Hero explained, airlines have found out that by using social media for customer service they not only gain in terms of response speed and customer engagement, but they are also able to listen to what is being said about them, and react accordingly.

Not only airlines

According to data from an infographic that SimpliFlying developed with ACI Europe a staggering 77% of all passengers that travelled through Europe did so in a “social media enabled” airport, a clear sign that airlines are not the only ones engaging in social customer service.

This was also confirmed during the research for our crisis management top 10 where we found several cases of airports taking a hands-on approach on social media to assist passengers during a crisis.

Given how travelers increasingly go online to seek solutions to their problems, it’s only fair that airlines and airports live up to their expectations. If expectations from travelers aren’t enough incentive, competitors should be sufficient reason to sit up and take note. There’s no looking back now!

Are you an airline or airport wondering how you can keep up with competitors and offer 24×7 customer-service on social media? SimpliFlying, along with its partner InterGlobe Technologies, offers scalable social customer-service solutions that will take care of all your concerns. Get in touch with us at engage@simpliflying.com to learn more!

• Is your Airport Customer Services Delivery Under Pressure?
• Top 10 Crisis Management Case Studies: How Social Media Can Help Airlines Deal With Their Worst Nightmares
• [Presentation] How airports can use social media to drive retail
• [Infographic] Airports in social media – ACI Europe Study reveals startling data
• Top 10 Airports on Social Media – case studies of the airports best at driving engagement

Now that the adjustment period is over, we’ve decided to take a look at how airlines and airports have adjusted to the new layout and we’ve created this Top 10 deck featuring the Top 5 examples of Airline pages followed by the Top 5 Airport Pages.

During our research we were positively surprised by the quality of the work done by both airline and airport Facebook teams. However, sometimes we were disappointed to see how some companies appeared to be unaware of the change and had not adapted their Pages. Furthermore, especially on the airport side, we noticed that many companies had created beautiful cover images but had not filled their Timelines, leaving the very useful “milestone” feature almost unused.

Note: The airlines portion of this Top 10 was created adapting a guest post we wrote for Tnooz.

Loved this list? Think it could be better? Tell us in the comments. If you’re an airline or airport looking to fine-tune your Facebook strategy, drop us a line at contact@simpliflying to know more about how you can use Facebook to drive business goals.

• Eight steps to driving results for travel brands from the new Facebook timeline
• Love airlines just as much as branding and social media? Would you like to write a guest post for SimpliFlying?
• Top 10 Airports on Social Media – case studies of the airports best at driving engagement
• [Infographic] The first-ever insights into how airlines are using Google Plus
• Engaging the captive customer – Airlines and airports sitting on a gold mine of engagement opportunities

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 data for the last thirty days to discover the benchmarks around which other airlines can compare themselves.

Volume of Tweets

JetBlue is often held up as the darling of Twitter but when it comes to raw number of Tweets, both DeltaAssist (Delta’s dedicated customer-service channel on Twitter) and American Airlines beat them hands down. The customer support channel for Delta handles more than twice the number of questions than JetBlue. In terms of raw numbers, all seven airlines sent a total of 11,398 tweets in the last 30 days – that’s an average of 16 tweets per hour.

Fingers on the Buzzers

The aviation industry has some of the best response times of any sector but blazing a trail for others to follow is Delta Assist. The Twitter team at Delta managed to respond to 4,235 questions in the last 30 days with an average response time of just 11 minutes. They’ve either got some speedy typers or an army of people with their fingers on the buzzers waiting to reply.

Both US Airways and United are using their Twitter accounts to provide customer support but are not able to match the likes of Delta and JetBlue at the moment. It’ll be interesting to keep an eye on their response times to see if it comes down in the next few months.

Round The Clock Service

Out of the seven airlines we analyzed, only JetBlue and Delta Assist appear to have 24/7 operations. We used EST as the reference time and when we aggregated all the tweets it produced the revealing graph below. Clearly for most airlines, their Twitter support is a 12 hour operation. It’s possible that the data is skewed a little bit because the airlines will have their Twitter teams in different timezones, but most seem to be operating between 9am and 6pm EST.

With US Airways’ 8 hour response time, it crossed my mind whether their operations are in the right timezone. If most of their customers are from the West coast they could have a long wait if they post in the afternoon as the Twitter team will have all gone home for the day.

A Tweet By Tweet Breakdown

It’s interesting to see that nearly all US airlines are using Twitter as a customer support channel rather than a platform to promote themselves. Only Virgin America and Southwest Air are actively putting fresh content out on Twitter while the other 5 are focused almost exclusively on replying to customers. Delta have gone down the same road as Dell with road of one account for brand news and one purely for support and with the volume of tweets they send it’s probably a good idea. As more and more brands create dedicated support accounts on Twitter it might only be a matter of time before JetBlue and American Air decide to set up their standalone ‘support’ account.

Most airlines certainly seem to know that in order to manage their reputation online they need to be where the conversations are happening. Delta Assist are, in our opinion, laying down the benchmark for the sector with their lightning quick response times while sending the most number of tweets. JetBlue has always been the poster child for brands that get Twitter, but if Delta Assist continues to set the benchmarks, we might have to hold up a new king of Twitter.

Find out more about how Unmetric can help your airline benchmark its social media prowess here. Or drop us a line directly at unmetric@simpliflying.com. Look out for even more exciting stuff from our collaboration with Unmetric in the days to come!

You can see previous posts by Unmetric here.

• Airlines on Twitter Monthly Report for July 2011 reveals that more airlines have Twitter accounts than loyalty programs
• Delta Assist brings airline customer service to Facebook
• How airlines and airports can dramatically increase engagement on their Facebook Pages through one simple action
• Airlines on Twitter Monthly Report for August 2011: Cebu Pacific joins the big league and scores high!
• Airlines on Twitter in June 2011: Delta Airlines is the breakaway “listening and talking champion”

The glory of Pan-Am

The decline and demise of Pan-American World Airways in 1991 marked the end of an era in United States. Pan-Am was, for many decades, the de-facto flag carrier of the United States with an extensive international work. It was arguably the creation of American politics in the pre-deregulated industry before the early 1980s, as the airline flew international routes while other airlines were largely restricted to domestic routes.

For over three decades after the Second World War, Pan-Am held the stature as the leading international airline in terms of innovative products, as well as opulence in luxury travel, ushering in the jet age by launching the Boeing 707 in 1959, the iconic Boeing 747 in 1969 and record-breaking non-stops between New York and Tokyo, and Los Angeles and Sydney with the Boeing 747SP in 1976. Pan-Am also pioneered business travel with the launch of its clipper class, a market that was to become today’s lucrative business class. Pan-Am was a brand that Americans flew with pride – hardly a case with US based airlines today.

After more than two decades of deregulation, US legacy carriers are entrenched in their respective markets. Continental, US Airways and Delta have built a strong European network. American and Delta are strong players in Latin America while Northwest and United share the huge Asia-Pacific market. A merger between Northwest and Delta could see the emergence of a US international airline with a global network unseen since the days of Pan American at its height.

Can Northwelta re-capture Pan-Am’s brand excellence?

US airlines have ventured deep into the low-cost, low-price business model to stay afloat in the brutal competition in the deregulated US market. Such a model has inevitably crept into the international travel market, where winners of international accolades and awards such as those announced by Skytrax and the eminent Travel and Leisure magazine are usually barren of American airlines. Both the rankings did not feature a US airline in the top 10 this year.

On the bright side, the fact that Delta recently launched its New York-Mumbai flight with its brand new 777-200LR equipped with a new herringbone-styled Business Class is an encouraging sign indeed. Improving in-flight service and amenities would be a first step to build a strong brand affinity.

Learning from those who did it well, across the Atlantic

Successful mergers between KLM and Air France, Lufthansa and Swiss International may give indication of the possible benefits to be reaped by the Northwest-Delta merger. Lufthansa and Swiss, for example, cross sell their seats on their websites to provide customers with more travel options to choose from. Commonality in fleet management also provides an avenue to achieve cost efficiency. Air France and KLM have a highly similar international fleet of Boeing 747-400, 777; Airbus A330 and A340.

On the other hand, US airline leader American Airlines remains deep in the red with a US$1.4 billion loss in the second quarter of 2008 , which further emphasise the tough challenges ahead for the new industry leader.

Time to ponder…

What do you think? Can Delta-Northwest can emerge as a stronger airline and re-establish the position of American commercial aviation on the international stage?

Will we ever get back the glory days of Pan-Am for US aviation? Or will we forever have to pay for a packet of peanuts and to check-in our bags?

This is a special commentary written by guest contributor Hansen Yeong. Hansen’s father had worked for Singapore Airlines for more than 35 years and Hansen believes that he was born an aviation geek. He is an enthusiast in all forms of commercial aviation – from aircraft technicalities to airline management and marketing. Hansen is an Economics lecturer in Singapore and he enjoys writing. He is currently a contributor to SimpliFlying.com and working on his first novel.

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• Thoughts on the United and Continental merger – as quoted in the press
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There’s been a lot of chatter around the merger, though more negative than positive (check out the one by Center for Asia Pacific Aviation for a different view). But I’ve hardly read anything about how the merger would affect the brand. Even though the new airline (largest in the US with over 70,000 employees) will be operated under the Delta name, which currently doesn’t have any 747s and also doesn’t fly to Asia Pacific, the brand experience can certainly be enhanced to make the sum greater than the parts combined.

Here are five ways how Northwelta can leverage on the merger to boost its brand (something soon-to-be-merging airlines can keep in mind too).

1. Setting realistic expectations. Some of my friends have spent nights in airport transit areas as they missed their flights – not because they were late, but they were at the wrong terminal for their code-shared flight. A merged airline is likely to operate from different terminals, surely at the beginning, and it should make the extra effort to ensure that the passengers are rightly informed. Setting realistic expectations that things may just go wrong is key to building trust in the brand over time. Customers don’t lose faith in the brand when things go wrong, but when they unexpectedly go wrong.
2. Ensuring a consistent experience. Nobody likes change, including airline customers. But since change is inevitable, especially when the industry is going through tough times, the airlines must ensure that customers are getting as consistent an experience as possible over time. Even when something needs to be drastically changed, information transparency should be prioritized and customers should be kept well informed ahead of time.
3. Providing value first, then charging for it. Lately, many US airlines have introduced a fee for checking-in a second bag. If I’m flying a full-service airline, I don’t expect to pay an additional fee for a second bag, as this has always been a free service. It would leave me disgruntled. Putting up with a fuel tax is understandable, but in this case, I’m not being provided any additional value for the extra cost. Since a merged airline generally has greater market power, it would be inclined to over-charge for some existing services. But it is important note that to keep customers happy, it is always better to provide a value-add before charging them for it.
4. Engaging the customer. One of the secret weapons used by great airline brands is deep customer engagement. One great example of this was Singapore Airlines’ campaign prior to their first A380 flight to London, which was written about in a previous article. Ensuring customer participation in times of change works especially well as they feel they have a stake in the process. During a merger, latest web technologies can be tapped to get customer feedback and incorporating it in the new plans. Everything from suggestions for the in-flight menu to their preferred mode of reservation of tickets can be captured and attributed to the person. Holding competitions is yet another simple way to keep the customer engaged with the brand.
5. Keeping employees happy. This is probably the most difficult of these five branding suggestions to achieve. Employees tend to suffer the most during a merger, and keeping them happy, though difficult, can do wonders for a brand. Merging airlines should work hand in hand with the pilot unions and other airline staff representatives to ensure their interests are not overly compromised. Often, cultivating a family-like culture (think SouthWest and Virgin) among the employees can go a long way in cheering up the mood in tough times. Employees then pass on these good vibes to the customer resulting in a great brand experience. As always, Happy Employees = Happy Customers = Great brand!

Ponder that!

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The next article in this series, about how airline bankruptcies affect the brand, will be posted on Wed, April 30. Do keep a lookout for it.

• Happy Crew = Happy Passengers = Great Brand!
• Why the Southwest and WestJet alliance is good for both the brands
• Why time is running out for the Singapore Airlines brand to get into Web 2.0
• Thoughts on the United and Continental merger – as quoted in the press
• Emirates engages employees through self-composed music video