Use Twitter to get airlines’ attention
How social media became the best place to get attention
Passengers and airlines alike are wising up to the power of treating social media as a public customer service hotline.
Two hours after a September flight from Los Angeles to Chicago was scheduled to take off, the plane was still on the tarmac, temperatures in the cabin were rising and a passenger with a Twitter account had a hankering for a White Claw hard seltzer. “Chaos on @united flight UA1987. Send us @WhiteClaw ASAP #TheThirstIsReal,” Joshua Maresca tweeted. United Airlines was listening. After landing, a member of the airline’s social media team told the passenger United “heard your calls for the claw” and handed him a case.
“Was I still mad I missed my dinner plans? Of course,” said Maresca, of Los Angeles. But the way the airline went the extra mile — and showed a sense of humor — made a difference. “It really lightened the mood,” he said.
Passengers and airlines alike are wising up to the power of treating social media as a public customer service hotline. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook can give passengers a platform to air their grievances and quickly get help on the go. Airlines, meanwhile, are tuning in more closely than ever, both to keep tales of travel gone awry from spiraling into public relations nightmares and to seize opportunities to build goodwill with travelers and their followers.
Millions of people will head to the airports this holiday season, when U.S. airlines are expected to carry between 2.2 million and 3 million passengers each day between Dec. 19 and Jan. 5, according to industry group Airlines for America.
Add in winter weather — especially in Chicago — and at least some are guaranteed to run into delayed flights, missing bags and other travel headaches.
In the early days of Facebook and Twitter, customers who got tired of waiting on
hold when calling traditional customer service hotlines or failed to get a response over email turned to online public shaming as a last resort. Now, passengers start conversations with private messages as social media has become a place to seek help, not just vent, said Harry Rollason, marketing director of customer service messaging company Conversocial.
Michael Petrelis tweeted at United when his luggage failed to make it on to a recent flight from Newark to the Dominican Republic. Petrelis, of San Francisco, said he’s tweeted at companies before when he feels they “aren’t being good corporate citizens,” and prefers to post publicly, though he messaged United privately so he could send longer messages.
“It keeps the company, hopefully, more responsive,” he said.
A tweet can’t rescue a vacation ruined by a canceled flight, and the potential audience doesn’t guarantee better treatment than a traveler would get over the phone. In the case of the missing luggage, Twitter wasn’t a magic bullet. According to Petrelis, the bag, which contained medications, still hadn’t arrived the day after his flight and the airline turned down a request for an upgrade on his flight home.
Sometimes, all a passenger gets is an apologetic note. But airlines will offer updates about flight delays or field questions about bag fees and upgrade policies, at times within minutes.
Airlines based in North America take about 20 minutes, on average, to respond to public tweets, according to a 2018 report on airlines’ Twitter activity from Conversocial. Chicago-based United was the slowest, but the airline said it’s gotten faster over the past two years, bringing the average time it takes to respond to public and private Twitter and Facebook messages from 191 minutes down to 8 minutes.
Airlines say they have increased the size of customer service teams focused on social media as the number of messages has grown, though Southwest Airlines still gets more calls than Facebook and Twitter messages. According to Conversocial, airlines were mentioned in anywhere from 9.6 tweets per hour at Spirit Airlines to 95.4 per hour at Chicago-based United, though airlines responded to fewer than a quarter of those messages, on average.
United increased the size of its social customer care team by 50% at the start of 2017. Since then, it went from responding to half of messages it considers “engageable” to 99%. That only counts posts that give United the opportunity to take action in response, not messages from frustrated customers who just want to vent.
“It was clear to us that oftentimes social media is the easiest and fastest way for customers to reach out to us in their moment of need, especially if they are at the airport or perhaps onboard,” said Maggie Schmerin, United’s managing director of social and digital media.
As airlines have staffed up to handle the influx of customer service requests, they’re also keeping a closer eye on what passengers are saying about them. A series of high-profile incidents in 2017 made it clear that what happens on social media has real-world consequences for airlines.
At Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, video of 69-year-old David Dao being dragged down the aisle of a United Express aircraft quickly went viral, and the backlash mounted when United initially appeared slow to apologize. The airline later reached an undisclosed financial settlement with Dao.
United said its decision to increase the size of its social customer service team predated the backlash over Dao’s flight. But both United and Southwest said that situation and other viral incidents prompted the airlines to have their social media teams work more closely with the rest of the airline’s operations, including giving them seats in the control centers where employees oversee all airline operations.
“When you start to see all their followers chime in, it’s like a snowball getting bigger and bigger,” said Rob Hahn, business consultant and social care liaison at Southwest. “If we can at least engage, that can slow things down a little.”
The hundreds of employees monitoring social media traffic — Delta Air Lines has 150 responding to customer service-related messages in five cities — aren’t just on the lookout for potential public relations nightmares. Airlines are also getting savvier about spotting opportunities among passengers’ tweets and Facebook messages to boost their reputations.
When Frontier Airlines delayed, then canceled, an October flight that was supposed to take a New Jersey high school cross country team to a race in Orlando, Florida, coaches couldn’t find another way to get all 80 athletes to the race with less than 24 hours’ notice and assumed the trip was over, said Matt Purdue, head coach of Ocean City High School’s boys cross country team.
But students tweeted about the canceled flight and tagged Delta in a post. The airline, which doesn’t usually fly between Philadelphia and Orlando, saw the tweets and sent a plane and crew from Atlanta to Philadelphia to pick up the team. Frontier worked with Delta on the team’s travel arrangements.
The private flight took off around 4 a.m. and, despite the lack of sleep, the boys’ team won and the girls took second, Purdue said.
“I couldn’t believe people were being so nice to us,” he said.
So do passengers with bigger online audiences get better treatment? When it comes to customer service questions, airlines say they work to treat everyone equally, though employees do see passengers’ follower count.
When United’s social media team recognized a United aircraft in a photo Tyler Cameron, a contestant on “The Bachelorette,” posted, they gave him a first-class upgrade for his return flight — and a red rose. Cameron has since had a more formal influencer partnership with the airline, Schmerin said.
The airline wants employees to be aware of when an influencer is on board, and flight attendants have an app that provides information on passengers, including those with a large social following, Schmerin said.
But a passenger’s digital audience is hardly the only factor, Schmerin said. The airline invited a Denver family out for a tour of the airport that turned into a surprise reunion between the dad, returning from military deployment, and his two sons after their mom reached out on social media.
“We didn’t look up the mom or family to say are they on social media, and will they post about it,” Schmerin said. “It’s something we’re mindful of, but it’s not the only thing.”
Nor did Sarah Atkinson’s relatively modest audience on Twitter — fewer than 300 followers — keep American from jumping on her private message asking the airline to consider doing something special for her parents, Gary and Carol Clair, who were celebrating their 50th anniversary with a European river cruise.
With less than a day’s notice, American surprised the Schaumburg couple with balloons, champagne and a business-class upgrade on the second leg of their trip, Atkinson said.
Gary Clair said he and his wife have been flying American for years but usually travel in coach. “I took a picture on my phone of the tickets, because I’ll probably never see that again,” he said.
That kind of service is hardly something travelers can count on. The results are usually more modest, airlines say. About 10,000 passengers have gotten rewards like frequent flyer points, vouchers for free Wi-Fi or Southwest-branded swag since the airline began scouring social media for passengers to surprise with a perk about four years ago.
“We don’t want it to be an expectation,” said Ashley Mainz, Southwest’s senior manager of social business.
Tales of airlines going above and beyond to help particular travelers often generate buzz, but Dan Gingiss, a speaker and consultant focusing on customer experience, questioned whether the impact lasts.
“I would much rather they focus on making every customer’s experience good to great than making one customer’s experience viral,” he said.
Airlines and passengers say they think there’s value in giving passengers positive stories memorable enough to share, even if it can be tough to quantify.
“Most of the time, if anyone is talking about a flight it’s because it was a bad experience, or it was late or their luggage was lost,” Atkinson said. “To have a story you can’t stop talking about because it’s so fun and special, I have to think there’s some benefit to the airline in that.”
If travelers without a big audience are trying to get an airline’s help over social media, Gingiss advises starting with a private message and keeping the tone civil despite the stress of travel. Choosing not to air grievances in public might buy some goodwill, and many conversations will end up moving to a private channel anyway to keep the passenger’s personal info or booking details out of public posts, he said.
“It’s not the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, it’s the customer who’s respectful and polite and asking for something reasonable,” he said.