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 Data Lab here)

How are airlines driving real-time customer service?

Share local knowledge

One of the most innovative tools being used by CityJet is their Twitter concierge. The aim of the program is to provide personalized recommendations to travelers who request them. This helps drive their goals in engagement, customer service and revenue. Goals and KPI’s of social customer service programs need to translate back to the core metrics of the brand and marketing.

“Twitter has become the ‘go to’ tool for customer service within the travel industry. The majority of our passengers are business travelers and the Twitter Concierge taps into their need for a swift, efficient and seamless travel service.” – Christine Ourmieres, CEO CityJet

Provide personalized attention

London Heathrow Airport has a Twitter Concierge program that is not only focused on the expected topics like flight delays and gate changes, but it’s open to general questions from travelers such as where to find a nice pint of cider in the airport.

Combining the necessary information with the helpful human feel shows positive results at London Heathrow. Their goals of engagement and customer service are met while providing personalized advice.

Be where you’re needed

Delta was one of the first airlines to dedicate resources to social media, recognizing the importance of acknowledgement and resolution. The need to give their customers what they want led to a guaranteed reply within 10 minutes on Twitter, plus dedicated social media customer service and support in Spanish and Portuguese.

So how do you get started?

Here are some great tips on taking those first steps.

• Select a team or individual to run your social media efforts and support them with Subject Matter Experts.
• Get started with existing customers. Your organization may not have a large social following, so reaching out to your existing customer base to engage and scale from there.
• Translate the metrics back to the core brand marketing goals.

The full webinar is available below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Is your airline or airport looking for scalable customer-service solutions on social media? SimpliFlying can help! To know more, write to us at contact@simpliflying.com.

• Q&A: How Brands Can Perform Real-Time Customer Service on Social Media
• Making ancillary revenue work with brand strategy – my interview
• Air New Zealand’s in-flight concierge has all the answers in the air
• Why Airlines (and Airports) must shift to Social Customer Service
• Exclusive webinar on airline marketing & branding: Registration now open

For example, can you answer the following questions:

a)      If your airline has a large number (say 10,000) of followers on Twitter, will you answer queries asked by each of those people?

b)      If yes, how will you manage it? Do you have the resources? More, importantly, will you be able to sustain this as follower numbers increase?

c)      If no, will you choose to respond to only certain people? Is your selection criteria based on any objective parameters?

A recent infographic revealed that more than 180 airlines are now using Twitter. Interestingly, it showed that United Airlines is mentioned in about 160 tweets per day but sends out a paltry 3tweets a day. Also, most of the tweets have something negative to say about United. Why doesn’t United engage its customers more on Twitter?

Two answers come to mind: first, that it doesn’t have a planned Twitter strategy in place. Second, even if it has a social media strategy, it doesn’t have the resources to carry it out.

Questions for an airline’s social media team

So, how should airlines that have a large, active audience on social media manage their audience? There are two things that all airlines looking to manage their social media audiences should be able to answer.

a)      Do you know the frequent flyers in your social media audience?

b)      Do you know which of your frequent flyers has the most influential social media presence?

Webinar on how airlines can drive value through Social CRM

Why is answering these questions important? First, it’s no longer the age of traditional customer relationship management. As Simplifying has mentioned before, CRM is now Cult Relationship Management. Simply put, from an airline’s perspective, a particular frequent flyer might have a huge social media presence with a large number of “followers” and friends. Now, this audience, which is not directly known to the airline, could fly them someday based on just a tweet or Facebook status message from the frequent flyer. It can therefore be hugely rewarding for an airline if it’s able to identify such “cults” that exist in its customer base.

Register for our special, free webinar on 5^th April at 10 am EST for the answers to all these questions. Apart from this, there’ll be a detailed walkthrough of a new Social CRM system that SimpliFlying is producing in partnership with JitterJam.

• [Infographic] How Airlines across the world are dedicating resources to Social Media
• Top 10 Crisis Management Case Studies: How Social Media Can Help Airlines Deal With Their Worst Nightmares
• Randy Petersen of Flyertalk on social media and frequent flyers – Part 2 of 2
• Airlines rush to get brand pages on Google+, but why? 7 questions to ask before you join a new social media platform
• [INFOGRAPHIC] How Airlines Use Twitter – customer engagement done right, or gone wrong?

Ever since airlines exploded into social media through a multitude of platforms and services, there has been a half-hearted race to gain the proverbial “first-mover advantage”. And too often, airlines trying to one-up one another on follower numbers miss the point of these new mediums. It’s to drive specific business goals and then measure the results.

The two pillars of social media success for airlines

1. Getting into social media is critical, but not without a strategy

A few years ago, when social media was the new, hesitant, unshapely kid-on-the-block, it seemed to be yet another distraction for teenagers. Today, many airlines, big and small, have leveraged social media to gain access to a hitherto unreachable audience, both in terms of demographics and size.

Although social media provides a fantastic platform for instant interaction and driving buzz, the platforms employed can become banes if there isn’t a specific strategy (linked to business objectives) in place. For airlines especially, there needs to be a focus on which key goals are to be met via social media as well as how to scale up in the long-term. Otherwise, you might end up like Jet2, which had to shut down its Twitter account when they couldn’t deal with the excessive traffic it was receiving.

And this brings us to the next, more crucial “pillar”.

2. You must know which metrics to measure, and how

In many business circles, a common assumption is that it is enough to “enter” or “place yourself” in social media. The rest will happen on its own when fans and followers are acquired. That is a myth.

Although fan- and follower-numbers are good metrics to measure the awareness your airline has generated, solely depending on a specific number of fans to measure success can be fatal.

Can your social media team answer these questions?

1. How many of your Facebook fans have flown you at least thrice in the last 3 months.
2. How many of those in your Frequent Flier program have more than 5000 followers on Twitter?

The key take-away from this point is that the buck doesn’t stop with follower numbers: look beyond them, there’s a wealth of information those numbers can provide if you know where to look and what to look for.

If you didn’t have the answer to either of the above questions, you need to attend our webinar on driving social media ROI for airlines on March 1.

Webinar on driving social media ROI for Airlines

In the webinar, Shashank Nigam, CEO of SimpliFlying will walk airline executives through a detailed roadmap of how to establish benchmarks, select metrics and translate social media initiatives into numbers. Sign up today for the webinar at http://bit.ly/airlineroi and learn how to use ROI Dashboards to determine success.

If you’d like to win a free pass to the webinar, just give one of the two best answers to the following question:

What is the best way for airlines to measure success on social media, a.k.a ROI?

You can answer on Quora, Twitter (@simpliflying) or in the comments here to qualify.

• Social CRM for Airlines – Managing the Cult and driving true value (Plus: upcoming webinar)
• Building Brands: Customer Service is now Real-Time [Full Webinar]
• The SimpliFlying Social Media Cheatsheet for Airline Marketers
• [PRESENTATION] How Airlines Dedicate Resources to Social Media – delivered at #omtravel in Miami (June 2011)
• [Infographic] How Airlines across the world are dedicating resources to Social Media

63% of airline executives think that ancillary revenues will be a major source of profits in the future. But are they getting it right with the short-term moves like charging for water and then reversing the charge? Probably not. And this was the issue I addressed in my webinar entitled “Airlines 2.0: 5 ways to unleash the potential of ancillary revenues in a downturn.” The webinar was very well received with some very interesting questions asked by the participants.

And I’m sharing the slides from that webinar here. The slides include a bonus video (see slide 14) which I couldn’t show during the webinar since it wasn’t possible to do it remotely. But I’ve integrated them here exclusively for my blog readers.

Here’s what you’ll learn from these slides:

• Make un-bundling work to suit your customers’ lifestyles
  
• Entice customers through “reverse-bundling” in the recession
• Maximize existing revenue channels, without compromising the brand
• Cultivate new revenue channels using Web 2.0 tools, like Facebook, Twitter and blogs
• Increase conversion rates for ancillary channels
• Keep the brand intact while earning more per customer

I’d love to have you feedback on the slides below and please feel free to share them with those you think would benefit from it.

• Ancillary revenue: A boon or a bane for the airline brand?
• Exclusive webinar on airline marketing & branding: Registration now open
• Low cost airline brands get creative with ancillary revenues – lounges, shops and cargo!
• Making ancillary revenue work with brand strategy – my interview
• Airlines 2.0: Using technology for branding through the recession – webinar slides