Tweet your airline rage

Social media is hailed as the new way of marketing.

In many areas when handled appropriately, it can be a great tool. But many a company has listened to its PR people and set up Facebook and Twitter accounts, and then not really had any plan, or unique abilities, or real advantages.

There are some who have dealt with it well. Delta airlines in the USA have used @DeltaAssist to help out travelers on Twitter and Facebook.

Its no surprise that 93.8% of all tweets to airlines in March 2011 were about customer service issues, which is airline parlance for 'complaints'. No surprise, because Twitter is the perfect medium to release explosive anger.  It is short and immediate - just what you need.

AirAsia - are using Twitter to harness that anger by letting you have a faux twitter conversation with their CEO when you can't get through to their call centre.

There model is perfect - it allows frustrated flyers to get an instant answer to simple complaints (during restricted hours) without publicly sharing passenger anger to everyone else, by using Direct Messaging (DM).

It will be interesting to see if they take this further, and use these complaints from passengers to:

1. Improve service based on customer feedback
2. Use public responses on Twitter to provide other passengers who might have the same problem, the same response
3. Build relationships with their passenger complainants

AirAsia already responds to the highest percentage of tweets of any airline (>40%).

The proof of service will come when we see how many of these complaints they resolve satisfactorily!

Source: Simpliflying