A New Way to Tell Your Airline You Hate It

Tweets are a terrible communication channel for solving customer service related issues. I run a customer support team, and almost all of our customer service related tweets end up with us either emailing the customer directly (if we can identify them) or asking them to email us so that we can get more information about their issue/concern. Text at least gives you a private chat where you can give information that you wouldn't publicly post on twitter. It helps drive to a much quicker resolution and overall provides a much better customer experience. If I were in their shoes I would 100% be pushing for this so that I can do my job better. It will definitely reduce the noise on twitter, but I don't think that's the main motivator here, just a nice side effect.

The article is slightly too optimistic, bordering on naive.<p>My problem is not that I hate airlines. My problem is that I hate (some of) them because they keep ignoring my complaints. Even when it is &quot;hugely expensive&quot; for them to listen to me, they still keep me around for hours.<p>If the medium were the reason of traveler&#x27;s unhappiness, all problems would have been solved by now with Twitter&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;WhatsApp. Social media gives users (some) power back, by making public shaming a real possibility. Texting won&#x27;t change that anytime soon.

I fly weekly. After every flight and almost every phone call I get an email requesting I take a survey. Knowing how metrics driven most big companies are (I&#x27;m a consultant) I have to assume that for all the complaining nobody is filling out these surveys. When I fill them out things happen. Every time I give a negative review I find myself higher in the upgrade list or upgraded outright. It&#x27;s actually a &quot;hack&quot; another frequent traveler taught me. Give negative reviews, get more upgrades.<p>Forgive typos I typed this on an iPhone

I get that it&#x27;s a catchy title and all, but give the airlines a chance here. This seems like a genuine attempt to provide better customer service and we should applaud companies for actually bothering to try.

I had a stewardess dump a tray full of water on me and my laptop about an hour into a 5 hour flight. She couldn&#x27;t give me more than a $50 credit, and I had to go to the customer service rep desk after the flight.<p>First thing he said after I explained to him the situation was &quot;Do you have twitter?&quot;. Confused, he explained to me that it was the first thing he had to tick off on the customer resolution checklist. I get it, but a bit of insult to injury.

I&#x27;m disappointed to see more companies trending towards text messages. Text message should be used only for time-sensitive communication, but some companies (like my network carrier) text me to let me know things like my bill was auto-paid.<p>I&#x27;ll be in the middle of coding and my phone goes off, so I stop everything I&#x27;m doing to see that my monthly was autopaid. With email, I check it every 2 hours to minimize distractions and I can also use filters to ignore certain routine emails, but companies text messaging me feels like an intrusion into my privacy.

I&#x27;ve tried to tell &quot;my airline&quot; I hate it - by not flying, but they still update planes with smaller and smaller seats and less leg room.<p>Maybe I need to tweet to several airlines every time I drive somewhere instead of fly. I&#x27;d prefer to arrive in hours, but the last time I flew reminded me of why it had been years since I was on a plane.

Great. Another way for companies to send me an automated response that doesn&#x27;t answer my question.

This is Marketing brilliance. Get your irate customers to talk to you through text and you&#x27;re much less likely to have to resolve something displayed for public on the internet via a review.<p>Not saying both won&#x27;t happen, but you give yourself the option to fix the issue before it&#x27;s really &quot;a problem&quot;.

I had a great experience with SMS as customer service. I bought some pens from OfficeDepot and they didn&#x27;t ship. Texted their support SMS number with my problem and upon request of my order number, I just took a picture of the order email receipt on my computer monitor. I half-expected MMS not to work with their service, but it was fine. They found the problem in a few minutes and I got a shipping confirmation.<p>This was a huge time saver from my perspective. No reading of order numbers, no waiting on hold, no confirmation of order details. The real value in my situation was the delivery of my full context to the appropriate service that could help me. I think WeChat is riding this exact wave.

Slightly off topic. As someone who values privacy a lot and doesn&#x27;t give out phone numbers much at all, I prefer other ways to communicate with service providers where the user identifier is easier to switch&#x2F;change (changing one&#x27;s phone number is a lot more tedious than changing email addresses because many people, at least from the last two decades, have the habit of using multiple email addresses segregated by usage but have just one phone number).

Brands looking to manage the challenge of communicating one-on-one with their customers via messaging should have a look at: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hubtype.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hubtype.com</a><p>They recently completed YC Start-up School.<p>Full disclosure, I am a very minor investor in the business.

Here I thought this was going to be about someone having implemented my idea.<p>Basically, a fund you can donate to that then looks for lawsuits against the airlines to underwrite Peter Thiel&#x2F;Gawker&#x2F;Hulk Hogan style.

How is this different from what they are already doing on Twitter?

This may be an ad for some SMS platform.

They are talking here about SMS while some airlines already use Facebook messanger and Whatsapp which is way more convenient than SMS messages