sbm12

Earlier today while sitting in a horribly crowded and overheated gate area at CPH and watching the clock tick away on our connection I DM'd the @United account with my PNR and asked to be protected on the later flight. I sent the message at 7:10am EDT. I got a reply back at 7:29am EDT noting that the additional segment had been added to my record and a follow-up email noting some potential weather delays on the UA side which might help my chances. Not only did they look at what I asked and respond quickly and professionally, but they went the extra step to try to allay my concerns.

I could get used to that sort of service.


I have been quick to judge them in the past and had no compunction about calling out their social media efforts as lackluster or misguided. Compared to the @united of old this is a HUGE step in the right direction.

Anyone else seeing positive interactions with the Twitter team?

demkr

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_1_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10B329 Safari/8536.25)

Yes. Noticed slight (albeit welcome) increase in interactions. Having a DeltaAssist style thing would be ideal. But marginal progress is surely better than no progress at all

IAH-OIL-TRASH

That is so cool. I'll have to keep that in mind when at outlier stations.

mgcsinc

I've always been a bit dubious about this approach. There are some companies for which complaining @ them on twitter is the only way to get anything done. I just feel bad for all the "normal" customers who don't realize that they're supposed to go on twitter to get customer service.

aacharya

Vastly different demographics and customer needs. Usually tweets are irrops issues not CS issues after flight.

mgcsinc

I didn't mean CS in that sense, I meant it generally.

My point was this:

In IRROPS . . .
Admittedly, that's extreme and not really accurate, but you get the point. In some industries, it really does seem to be that extreme.

*Note that the techno kid doesn't have status.

sbm12

It is simply another contact touch point. I could have called and spent the $$$ on roaming charges or tried to figure out if there was free wifi to use Skype on. Instead I sent a quick message and it got handled. It would have been via the other means, too, but now there is yet another option available. I like having more options, especially when they are well staffed.

aacharya

Fine with me. The techno whiz is happy with that process. The kettle will always wait to tell CS about grandma missing them and having months to live. The business person will make his admin do the work. Now..the FTer will just pop in the lounge rebook in Y get CPU and bonus miles and take a bump on his or her routing. To each his own.

hobo13

I should probably know, but what does DM mean? Is that just to say you tweeted UA?

mgcsinc

See, hobo is gonna be stuck waiting on hold!

johnmont

Guess we all need to start an incredibly useful flying blog like Seth's so @United will follow us.

Its great to hear they responded, but I'm not so sure this means a big change for us normal folks. I hope it does, but the cynic in me says they reacted the way they did *because* it was Seth.

rob_flies_ua

They responded pretty quickly to me, a blogosphere nobody, when I tweeted them from the middle east early on a sunday morning east-coast time. They weren't able to provide a useful rebooking option, unfortunately, but the response time was impressive.

johnmont

That's good to hear.

Part of my point is that I can't DM @united because they're not following me.

But if they're responding to normal tweets that's interesting. Though I'd never tweet my PNR.

LarkSFO

OK, I'll sign up for twitter...

Can somebody point me to a twitter for dummies tutorial?

rob_flies_ua

I think I did a normal tweet @ them a while back at which point they started following me so that I'd be able to DM them, and then this time around I was able to DM them my PNR without any additional work necessary.

http://mashable.com/2012/06/05/twitter-for-beginners/