Bristish Airways, voted Best Transatlantic Airline 2012 Winner is lagging behind in the social media customer service experience league.
Facebook and Twitter have become the two social media networks that are transforming and changing the dynamics of customer service through social web. Businesses seeing the potential benefits when done well and the consequences of a mismanaged social interaction with their customers, more businesses are turning to social media as the next big channel to help them in their customer service efforts.
In the airline industry, where consumers mostly have complaints concerning delayed flights, mishandled luggage and flight booking, an open and timely responses to a gripe can relief consumers frustration and create positive word-of-mouth. Consumers have a high expectation of companies when they need customer support.
From an info graph published by Conversocial, one of the leading Social CRM platforms, stated that 50% of consumers are actively using social media to request for support from companies, with 46% of them hoping to get their issues resolved when they tweet or post it. With about 81% of Twitter users expecting same day response as compared to 22% of Facebook users.
Due to this a lot of companies leading the chase for a better social customer experience through social media have dedicated Twitter profiles or Facebook apps for interacting with their customers concerning service or support issues.
British Airways despite winning the top spot at the 2012 World Airline Awards held at Farnborough Air Show for passenger satisfaction, the story is quite different on social media where the brand is still struggling to meet most consumers’ expectations in how brands should respond to complaints and questions.
Below is a snapshot of how British Airways is doing in terms of their responsiveness and timeliness on Twitter.
There’s stillroom for improvement, but then it might take time to see how well brands are able to adapt to social media for customer service.
Find more insights on how other brands are leveraging on social media for customer service at Nevahold.
About the Author: Kena Amoah is a consumer advocate and the CEO of Nevahold, a customer service application that analyzes customer service performance of companies on social media and empower consumers to directly engagement with companies using their social influencers. His focus is to build products that help change the how consumers receive support from companies and also help companies retain their customers by understanding their customer service expectations. As a social media and virality expert he gives regular tips on his Twitter handler @ismekena. He is also very passionate about Gamification and Big data with it’s impact on business rules on occusions write guess post onBusiness2community.