The Secret to a Successful Airline Customer Service Twitter Account
Skift Take
Travel brands that have separate Twitter accounts to handle customer inquiries should take a step back and reassess their strategy to determine whether it's the most effective use of their resources.
Does having a separate social media customer service account instead of handling all brand messaging and reservation-related inquiries on a universal account more effective for airlines?
Skift and Socialbakers went under the hood of the world's most active airlines on social media to find out. We tallied how many questions were asked and answered to determine Questions-to-Reply-Rate (QRR) and the nature of inquiries based on the words used in tweets that got the most replies.
We looked at three airlines -- American Airlines, British Airways, and United Airlines -- that use one account to communicate their brand message and handle customer inquiries. We also analyzed three other airlines -- Delta, Emirates Airlines, and Etihad Airways -- that have multiple Twitter accounts dedicated to answering questions to get both perspectives.
From this sample, separate customer service Twitter accounts were less effective because they left a considerable amount of questions unanswered in the main account and by-and-large these flyers were not redirected to the dedicated customer service account.
The quick takeaways:
Brands that have universal accounts perform 12 percent better than airlines with dedicated accounts based on QRR.
American Airlines is the most responsive out of the six airlines with a QRR of 57 percent and Emirates was the least with a QRR of 27 percent.
In addition to the quantity of tweets being responded to, we also took a peek at the top 100 keywords of each airline to understand the type of inquiries asked and replied to most. We found across the board, that customers tweeted about themselves using "me" and "my" and their "flight" and "flights." They also directed their inquiries to the brand with "you" and "your" and expressed duration and urgency with "time", "been" and "now."
When it came down to delays and cancellations, it was surprising to see that it wasn't a keyword that appeared in the top 100 keywords for Emirates and Etihad, considering their poor on-time performance. Of course this is all dependent on how Twitter-friendly their passengers are which may be much less that American carriers.
The flyers that were the most polite were tweeting "please" at @BritishAirways and @EmiratesSupport while all airlines
