With Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare now woven into the fabric of our daily lives, it’s no wonder that a handful of online tools have emerged to make holiday travel planning fun and efficient: JetZet, Dopplr, TripIt and GlobeTrooper, to name a few.
The strength of these services is their ability to coordinate your itinerary, in real-time, with input from friends, family and fellow travelers familiar with your destination, complete with tips for where to go and what to do.
But the real question is: aside from travel applications that complement the conversational ability of social networks, how do airlines employ social commerce to grow their bottom line ( and consumer base ) by lowering customer acquisition cost?
Social Time is Real Money
It’s one thing to put up a billboard, bus ad or a 30-second commercial and hope for outbound marketing success at a specific time or place; it’s another to be everywhere your customers are, all the time, and that’s the true power of social networks for the travel industry. Most importantly — inbound marketing via social media, by and large, is free and can be updated on-the-fly.
Travelers are flocking to airline accounts on Twitter in huge numbers, for two reasons: discount deals and instant customer service. While the money savings passed to the consumer is significant ( from the likes of United Airlines “Twares” and JetBlue’s “Cheeps” — ex: $44 from BOS to JFK ), the ability to resolve a passenger concern in a matter of seconds is the clearest way to instill brand loyalty on a grand scale, ensuring their travel dollars stay with you.
That is, when it works …
A large part of Virgin America’s recent customer service troubles has to do with their decision to take down their online booking system for one week as they switched to a new reservations platform.
The idea was to not disrupt service for travelers by shielding them from potential bugs in a new system; instead, the company’s decision overwhelmed the complaint response department and left celebrities like Soleil Moon Frye — of Punky Brewster TV fame — tweeting to her 1,433,431 followers that Virgin America had “broken her heart”.
Soleil Moon Frye as Punky Brewster in early '80s & her today
If customer service hadn’t been overwhelmed by corporate’s ill-fated decision to take down their online booking system, one small disappointment about a seat assignment might not have been broadcast to a population nearly twice the size of San Francisco, many of whom reside all over the world. It is 8 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep an existing one.
The takeaway: new apps, bells & whistles are intriguing — but with a brand like Virgin America, whose image is driven by youth, technology and a culture of cool, one small mis-step in the online arena can cause irreparable, bah-humbug harm to an established perception of first-class customer service.
2 Responses
Social media has empowered every consumer – companies and brands need to be aware and responsive or suffer the PR nightmare – great reminder to us all …
Thanks for weighing in Cyndee. We appreciate your feedback here.