Originally Posted by
CCIE_Flyer
Nevertheless, were I about to ask for a special favor, a social media platform would easily be the dead last channel to cross my mind (those people have training to primarily address branding, reputation, etc, no?). I think the poster’s experience underscores the flawed nature of following such a path, but I suppose all it cost them at the end of the day was some key strokes and a bit of wasted time before giving up and engaging in some good old fashioned one-on-one human interaction to ask for something not at all owed to them. Call me crazy.
Again speaking only in general terms (I have done a ton of interactions with airlines via Twitter DM but not Marriott) the agents handling Twitter (and Facebook Messenger) DMs are fully trained CS personnel and can handle all sorts of requests including things like same-day-confirmed changes, mileage/certificate upgrades, IRROPs rebookings, etc. Pretty much anything you could do with a phone agent that doesn't involve taking payment. And I have definitely gotten rules waivers (either on things that were unwritten rules for DM, plus a few things that were outside policy) via Twitter (nothing I haven't previously gotten from a phone agent though)
The Marriott analogy I would make would be more like doing a chat with the property in the app when that becomes available a day or two before check-in.
I also had a complicated issue involving crediting a partner flight where the first agent did what they could, sent me off to the partner airline which flatly refused to help, came back and asked if it could get pressed further from their side and ended up getting a call back from a supervisor who was empowered to make it happen for me, similar to the level of thing where in this forum we would get the Lurker team involved.
So I might suggest becoming more familiar with how some companies are using social media platforms to handle customer issues before dismissing the idea completely.