shorthauldad

Except I bet you'd get a faster response by Twatting BA them than by emailing them which is, quite simply, unfair!

shorthauldad

...and if they'd included some semi-naked cabin crew in their pic, they've had got a million more likes and comments, and it would have gone viral!

They'd probably have got just the same amount of revenue and quantifiable ROI i.e. zero

PanGalactic

My vote goes for being able to do an online chat, like you can on Avios.com

henkybaby

Actually Twitter is mostly used to send information. Facebook is used to interact with the customer. Both platforms offer the opportunity to exchange information in a private manner.

My guess is that a lot of the 'experts' here have little experience with social as a customer service instrument. It may be a bit long to fully explain but the idea is to create a flow of information to/from the customer and select which 'incidents' need to be taken care of individually (as you will see happen on the KLM FB page) and which can actually be resolved by the 'crowd' like we do here. This way you can focus your (limited) human resources on real problems.

It is funny that the people who are most critical are also those who think that FT is very useful. FT is in essence no different from FB. A community of people discussing topics, helping each other out and a (in our case a very limited) way to interact with the company we are interested in. How is that different from KLM's FB page? Only because BA did not start it?

shorthauldad: KLM already had several initiatives on FB that went (almost) viral. No need for naked cabin crew.

Globaliser

I seem to recall that email also offers this wonderful opportunity to exchange information with the customer in a private manner.

Please, tell me if I have got this wrong.

BizFlyin

If BA offered service via twitter, I would use it. Sending a tweet while roaming is cheaper than syncing my whole email account which could have multiple MB in it just waiting for me.

BA should have support channels which make the support experience as easy as possible for their customers. They have phone, website, why not have twitter? It's probably 'cheaper' for them to respond via twitter than have someone phone in.

mad_rich

Surely it's for BA to decide who it wants to focus attention on. It was never meant to be fair!

I think a lot of SM users have cottoned on to the fact that you can get things resolved quicker by publicly shaming a company, rather than in private.

dunk

No, you haven't got it wrong but you haven't got it completely right. As I suggested up thread, there is a generation that expects to do the majority of their communication by SM, and not voice or email. They are the customers of the future.

henkybaby

Yes, it does. However with email you need to respond to all email you get individually leading to the much hated copy / paste replies with meaningless apologies and long reaction times. Something we all criticize here. Social media allow the company to react to customers who post on it with a common information request by providing this information for all to see (thus reducing the amount of individual inquiries). If appropriate they can chose to send a private communication if needed. They can even leave the more general inquiries to the collective wisdom of the other users, like here.

Globaliser

Which, of course, immediately raises the question of whether one should give in to blackmail - does it make it worse for you in the long term - and whether customer service should simply respond to the demands of the roused rabble.

Globaliser

In a sense, I don't mind that; but as you also said, not at the expense of traditional channels which already do everything that SM does.

Although I do like the level of response I get from BA when I write a proper letter. ^

dunk

I'd much rather walk into a city ticket office and be called 'Sir' by an employee in uniform ... but I'm showing my age again

I can remember, not so long ago (15-20 yrs?), implementing internet access and email for the company I was with at the time. It wasn't clear (business case, ROI) why we needed it but we thought we probably should ! Social media now is probably the same.

However, we didn't tape up the letterbox or take the phones off the hook

colmc

Honestly, it's got to almost spammish levels at this stage.

HIDDY

Indeed...that's one reason why I don't take it seriously. It attracts too many weirdos......like this forum did yesterday.

shorthauldad

I have an friend who does a lot of business in France, he knows this one Frenchman who is on record as having said - within the last couple of years - that "he prefers faxes as email will never catch on"