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Social Networks

The People Who Read Your Airline Tweets (theatlantic.com) 54

Posted by msmash from the other-side-of-those-tweets dept.
From a piece on The Atlantic: At first, the idea of a company directly tweeting at its customers was very strange. Nowadays, people have gotten used to having back-and-forths with customer service representatives. In any given hour, JetBlue makes public contact with 10, 15, 20 different people. American Airlines receives 4500 mentions an hour, 70 to 80 percent of them on Twitter. Both companies staff their social teams with long-time employees who are familiar with the airlines' systems. Both hire internally out of the "reservations" team, so they know how to rebook flights and make things happen. At American, the average social-media customer-support person has been at the company for 17 years. Every major airline has a team like this. Southwest runs what it calls a "Listening Center." American Airlines calls it their "social-media hub" in Fort Worth, Texas. Alaska has a "social care" team in Seattle that responds to the average tweet for help in two minutes and 34 seconds, according to a report by Conversocial. Most of the time, it's a worthy, but low-profile job. But not always. This is the strangest thing about people tweeting with airlines: They're just a routine part of how the business works now. Tweets and Facebook posts go out via a social-media team and a customer-service team responds to the incoming problems, snark, and jokes.
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The People Who Read Your Airline Tweets More

The People Who Read Your Airline Tweets

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  • Stop it, it's annoying and disrespectful. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Dear companies:

    Please stop trying to be trendy and hip with your relaxed attitudes and by using social media. I am a paying customer and I demand formality and professionalism or you'll never get my money. You are not my friend and you are not hip. Just do what I pay you to do and spare your lip.

    • I do't have a smart phone.

      I wonder how long I will be allowed to fly.

      • You can access Twitter from whatever device you're posting from (although I don't know why you would).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Dog-Cow ( 21281 )

        Not long. The amount of smug you carry around with you blows way past the luggage allowance.

    • Re: Stop it, it's annoying and disrespectful. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Monster_user ( 5075027 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @08:08PM (#55780445)
      Twitter is no longer about being hip. It is about raising the bar for customer service. Once one company raised the bar, the others had to follow suite to meet the expectations of the customer.

      Twitter is a somewhat cost effective P.R. platform to respond to complaints at their source. The money paying these Twitter workers would have likely been spent on Surveys and advertising, or other P.R. efforts.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I love a good corporate apologist such as yourself. Special place in hell bud.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by phayes ( 202222 )

        I never saw the point to being on twitter. I'm only somewhat reluctantly on FB because it is the best way to keep in contact with distant family/friends.

        However, if twitter is becoming the most efficient means to reach good customer service as TFA indicates, I at last see a good reason for configuring a twitter account.

      • I agree, as someone who's used Twitter who's recently gotten fast replies and support from Southwest Airlines, Amazon, and EA lately without sitting in a phone queue or having to go through a longer web form to be allowed to submit an email request. You can include picture(s), it's public and visible, and it's easier. The amount of people griping here need to get off their own lawn and realize it's 2017 and the world has moved along.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Good lord yes.

      I don't want to "build an ongoing relationship" with an airline (or any other company for that matter) thanks. Just keep the god damn plane clean, well maintained, and train your staff properly. Don't send me "social update" emails or other bullshit that gets deleted unread, don't ask me to complete surveys or rate you 5 stars on TripAdvisor, don't send "welcome home" emails when my flight has landed.

  • Long time employees (Score:3)

    by sqorbit ( 3387991 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @08:15PM (#55780471)
    "At American, the average social-media customer-support person has been at the company for 17 years." - This is a major plus. I worked in call center in the past and the turn over rate is insanely high. We could turn over a team of 15-20 call center reps entirely in the matter of a few months. If this is a way that companies can get me in touch with a person who has at least some investment of their time and effort into the company I'm all for it. I'd much rather be typing over twitter to a long term employee than talking of the phone to an outsource call center rep who has zero care about my issue.

    • This is becoming even more absurd. So the airlines realize that people are sick of talking to callcenter script-monkeys instead of experiences customer service people who might know the company they are working for, and the result is NOT staffing the phone lines with them?

      I never understood why instead of contacting a company directly through well established means of bi-directional communication, people post something on the equivalent of a huge public office corkboard and hope that a potential recipient p

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mccrew ( 62494 )

        I never understood why instead of contacting a company directly through well established means of bi-directional communication, people post something on the equivalent of a huge public office corkboard and hope that a potential recipient picks it up from there from among those billions of tweets sent every minute.

        Sunshine, my friend. From a customer standpoint, having your own and others' interactions out in the daylight incentivizes the company to deal with them in a way that satisfies the customer. Companies are not so interested in leaving unanswered unfavorable opinions or problems that reveal patterns in such an easily-searchable, quantifiable, public medium.

        • Is the company required to even respond to your grievance on Twitter? I mean, when you call them, you expect somebody to pick up. When you shout at them on Twitter is there any such guarantee? Or does the company get to decide which complaints to address and which to ignore? If JetBlue is responding to 10 people on Twitter a day, out of thousands of mentions... And probably hundreds of people on the phone at any given time...

    • Hm... Last time I flew on American... last time I will ***EVER*** fly on American... if Twitter had been a thing, I'd have melted the inter-tubes with my ire. (Capsule summary: Not getting me to a single airport in time for my connecting flight, either way, not once. Getting in a day late. Losing my bags, allowing me only to talk to Baggage Central, refusing to connect me to baggage claim at the airport my baggage had likely been sent to, 60 miles away from where I was staying. Finally, got ahold of a

  • I use it preferentially now. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @09:48PM (#55780801) Journal

    I had an issue with a firm, and had spent an hour with customer service trying to sort it out, only to be stonewalled by an asshole manager.

    Gave up, someone suggested 'complain on twitter, you will DEFINITELY get a reply'...and sure enough writing an acerbic tweet about it and...voila, within about 5 minutes, I was contacted by a 'customer service team leader' who constructively dealt with my issue and we came to a compromise solution within about a half hour.

    FAR better to tweet angrily than to engage their 'customer avoidance support line'.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sconeu ( 64226 )

      I may have to get a twitter account, just for this.

      • I entirely agree with you.
        It's all I've used mine for.

        No, that's not quite true, I do follow a Great War twitter feed that gives "updates" from WWI daily as if they're today's news...really gives you a sense now in 2017 how things happened over time, instead of with our usual foreshortened historical perspective of this, then this, then this, then this....

        But I don't even check it nearly as much as I should. Honestly, I don't really "get" twitter, but then I'm old.

        • They could just tweet out all the time like a 24 hour news broadcast saying the same thing over and over and bringing in experts. You're basically saying, reading a news paper daily is such an experience. If you read updates from like the Iraq invasion once a day you would have had the same experience.

  • I got a response recently (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I tweeted about how I was (quite happily) boozing it up for free on my flight, and they responded almost immediately.

  • I'd prefer to be able to contact them in private (Score:4, Insightful)

    by johannesg ( 664142 ) on Thursday December 21, 2017 @03:05AM (#55781581)

    Wouldn't it be neat, if I had a question for an airline, if I could somehow contact them? Preferably without having to resort to pressure tactics on a public forum?

    But alas, contacting an airline is next to impossible. You can deal with endless automated systems, but an actual human who can respond to your actual questions? Forget it. Not gonna happen.

    It's good to know that Twitter is an option, and I guess I'll have to get a Twitter account now just so I can deal with issues I'd much rather deal with in private, but I guess that's the way the world works now.

  • My recent airline Twitter story (Score:3)

    by trawg ( 308495 ) on Thursday December 21, 2017 @07:14AM (#55782181) Homepage

    I bought a one way ticket home after four years abroad recently. It was super expensive. When I hit the "buy" button (after much agonising about the cost), I got a "generic error" on the website that indicated it didn't work - the whole process basically died. I tried again - same error. I tried a third time - and it worked. I assumed it was a temporary error that had cleared.

    Of course, 15 minutes later I got three tickets (for the exact same flight) and was charged three times. I called them immediately and was told it was a "website glitch" (the manner in which they explained it to me made it sound like this was not an uncommon problem) and they'd refund me immediately (subject to usual credit card refund processing times).

    Two weeks later I checked my credit card and saw I had been refunded - partially. Each refund was almost 10% short of the purchase price. Turns out I had been charged in AUD and refunded in GBP, and after currency conversion & credit card penalties I was out of pocket almost $300.

    I called their support back & explained the problem. They blamed the bank first, so I called them to confirm, which they did. I called back and had a very polite conversation with a guy who told me they couldn't help me and I'd need to contact their Customer Care team via email because it was an unusual problem.

    I did this. Waited two weeks for the (inevitable) response - we can't help with refunds, please call the phone team. Explained they'd sent me to them to no avail.

    Gave up and went to the Twitter team. Had to explain the problem several times in stages to get through the usual checklist but eventually someone senior picked it up, realised it was a problem, and refunded me.

    It's embarrassing that in 2017 large companies can basically be so incompetent that they can just put you into a support circle like this. There is absolutely no reason Twitter should exist as an emergency escape hatch for people stuck in that cycle, but I'm glad it does. I imagine once their traditional support load dries up because everyone gives up on it, they'll simply assume they can axe the whole department and then be totally surprised when their Twitter teams ask for more staff.

    • A lot of it is call volume numbers or handled issues numbers. The quicker they pass you off the better their score is. Doesn't matter if your problem was resolved or not.

  • I don't think people mind that Airlines have effective social media teams. However, what people like me do object to is the fact that an email or phone call or (gasp) paper letter goes into a black hole - But a tweet? You have a cheerful response, often with a resolution to the issue, within 30 minutes. I'd like companies to treat all communications equally and importantly - Yet because tweets (and, to a lesser extent, Facebook post) are public and searchable, they get higher priority.

  • Corporations have always wanted to provide a superior grade of service to people of means and influence.

    Now they can: they can judge your means by how you dress (all those security cameras need to pay for themselves), and your influence by the number and reach of your followers.

    You can bet some company is already offering up a service to instantly assess any given Twitter user's suasion score. Even better, those with low suasion scores who get routed to the cheap and disgusting call center will remain as bi

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