Keeping your Twitter service open two hours longer

A research analysis of 35 top airline brands on Twitter conducted by WaveMetrix showed how staying open two hours later could result in a drastic improvement in customer service, almost a 25% boost. (http://wave.wavemetrix.com/content/airlines-show-how-keeping-your-twitter-service-open-two-hours-longer-can-boost-i-01101)

Social media such as Facebook and Twitter has become a powerful tool for customer relationship management these days. As we discussed about the funnel in class, more and more companies are shifting from the “traditional” shape to the “trumpet” one.

In today’s fast-pacing world, people are getting increasingly impatient and place high priority on time. Providing prompt assistance for customers during and after the purchase could not only contribute to building loyalty and repeat purchases (keep customers), but also driving positive purchase intent buzz and attracting new customers (grow customers). The latter is particularly obvious for the social media since they are transparent and open to everyone in the world. Thus companies which deal with customer responses timely and appropriately will no doubt possess competitive advantages. Just consider the negative example of “broken guitar” in United Airline.

Yet there are numerous comments and responses every day, given the limited resources and time, how to tackle them effectively and efficiently? The social media “triage”, a response model we discussed in class provides a good answer as shown below.

 

But what we’d like to discuss now is from another perspective—data analysis. As we see in the article “airlines show how keeping your Twitter service open two hours longer can boost its customer service effectiveness by 25%”, 77% consumers tweet at airline brands fairly consistently from 9 a.m to 9 p.m. Since normally airlines’ Twitter services end on 5 p.m, consumers who post in the evening tend to be kept waiting, sometimes over 6 hours. And the next day when community managers start working, they have such a backlog of tweets to deal with. What’s worse, it triggers a knock-on effect for dealing with new tweets throughout the day, decreasing the customer service effectiveness largely.

So what could we do with these data? Clearly, 24-7 Twitter service providing a consistent service whatever the time proves to be a good way, such as DeltaAssist. Yet 24-7 service may be beyond some airlines with limited resources. Based on the data analysis, extending from 5 p.m to 7 p.m could easily result in greatly increased effectiveness. Actually, 21% of all those kept waiting for over 6 hours for a response tweeted between 5 p.m and 7 p.m. Just a little change, you could left your competitors far behind. This is exactly the happy middle EasyJet and AirFrance adopted.

The data analysis of your customers bring our attention to the macro principles of e-marketing as stressed in our first lecture—the POST framework. Apart from the traditional segmentation criteria such as socio-demographics and psychographics, the advent of Internet and social media brings in the new technographics / socialgraphics criteria.

–Where are your customers online?

–What are your customers’ social behaviors online?

–What social information or people do your customers rely on?

–What is your customers’ social influence? Who trusts them?

–How do your customers use social technologies in the context of your products?

Or in the airline case, when are your customers online. Learn to watch and get a deeper understanding of your customers with the advanced data analysis technologies. Then based on such understanding, develop corresponding strategies. For example, many B2C websites will analyze the buying habits of their customers, and then recommend relevant products to them. If you just buy a flight ticket to Hawaii in Kayak, you could receive the emails about discount or coupons for hotels or car renting in Hawaii a few days later. There are lots of analysis tools such as Google Adwords, Google Analytics and so on, which I will cover in the following posts.

However, this analysis only focuses on the Twitter services. As we know, airlines mostly adopt various customer service management channels, such as e-mails, telephone, facebook etc, both online and offline. Therefore, we have no clue at the moment whether airlines that only provided limited Twitter service provide 24-7 telephone service or else. It is highly possible that customers could still get high satisfaction by making a call. Furthermore, we also don’t know the percentage of customers using Tweet service. If it is just a small or even tiny percent, airlines do have a reason not to put too much effort on this channel. Of course, there is no denying that Tweet users are booming and airlines could by no means neglect this channel. This poses an interesting topic about the integration of various CRM channels, which we will explore in the later posts.

 

Reference:

Ed Bristow (August, 2013). Airlines show how keeping your Twitter service open two hours longer can boost its customer service effectiveness by 25%.  Retrieved from

http://wave.wavemetrix.com/content/airlines-show-how-keeping-your-twitter-service-open-two-hours-longer-can-boost-i-01101

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