If you find yourself in a pickle at the airport, don’t expect your airline to respond quickly to your tweets for help. Some do much better than others.
Conversocial, a software company that tracks social media interaction by major brands, recently completed a test that determined that when it comes to Twitter communication with customers, North American airlines are much more responsive than European ones. In its examination, 9 out of 10 North American carriers got back to customers about half the time.
Guess what—the most responsive carriers were the ones commonly perceived as the cheapest.
Alaska Airlines was the fastest, with an average response time of 2 minutes, 34 seconds. That’s far better than the North America average of 1 hour, 5 minutes.
The most responsive is Southwest Airlines, which gets back to customers about 43 percent of the time it’s mentioned on social media sites, compared to the North American average of 24 percent, and its social media response team works round the clock. During the airline's July outage, it dealt with some 93,000 social media messages over four days, reports CNBC.
Compare that Spirit Airlines, which needed nearly 6 hours to reply (good luck, flyers!) to one of Europe’s biggest low-cost carriers, easyJet, which required an abominable 16 hours and 50 minutes to get back to customers on social media.
Even though United Airlines recently reported it had a staff of about 24 social media monitors, it still only manages to reply 37 percent of the time, which is one of the least responsive records of all the major U.S. carriers. Of the poorly performing European pack, Lufthansa was the least bad.
Last March, a charter airline company did its own study and found that the quickest social media responses came from Mexican low-cost carrier Volaris, JetBlue, and Etihad Airways. But its results agreed that European carriers were nowhere near the most responsive.
The studies did not take into account the quality of the replies, either. Too often, the airline Twitter help desks just feebly apologize and suggest you contact Customer Service through traditional channels. With pressure like the Conversocial report, though, many carriers may want to improve their social game.
