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ASH UPDATE – Get me home!
Monday, 22 Apr, 2010
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TravelMole guest comment by Andrew Hull, product marketing director at RightNow. He flew to the UK on April 11 and then to Amsterdam on the April 13 for a meeting. He’s been trying to get back to San Francisco ever since. His wife and three small children want him home.
Compared to some of the travel disruption horror stories caused by the volcano ash-flow, my own, 17-hour, travel ordeal from Amsterdam to London by bus, ferry and taxi doesn’t seem so bad.
Like many of my fellow stranded passengers though, I was on the receiving end of some pretty inconsistent customer experiences as I changed modes of transports and, as a consequence, my channels of communication.
Crisis time is always the ultimate test of policy, protocol and procedure and it seems that in some cases the 2 fundamental rules of good customer experience, crisis or not, are still being neglected.
The first is knowledge. Equipping service agents with a single source of knowledge that can quickly be updated ensures consistency and accuracy of communication – two things that were sadly lacking when I was searching the web for info and then speaking to a service agent in the contact centre. When you’re in a bit of jam, there’s nothing more frustrating than finding that what you thought was the situation is actually 12 hours out of date.
Second, at a time of crisis a multi-channel approach to customer interactions is essential. Typically the phone channel bears the brunt of the communication but customers quickly become disenchanted with engaged tones or lengthy queues.
That’s why it’s imperative to offer customers multiple ways of finding out what’s going on.
For many people the web is their first port of call, so proactively posting regular, accurate updates here can alleviate the phone burden and customer frustration.
One airline I know of is experiencing a 2,000 per cent increase in web traffic since the disruption started but, by ‘pinning’ critical travel updates to its web landing page, only a fraction of those web hits are converting into service incidents.
Today’s ‘online culture’ means that social networking sites need to be included in any multi-channel strategy.
We’ve been monitoring the conversations taking place in the Twittersphere, see #getmehome for general Tweets, and it’s a mixed bag of riches for the airlines.
There are two elements at play here. One, travel companies do need to harness social networking sites as part of the customer experience strategy. Through sites like Twitter and Facebook it’s possible to communicate en masse with status updates and useful info as well as respond to passenger queries.
However, the other, darker side of social networking is that any poor customer experiences, regardless of the channel through which they occurred, are quickly shared among thousands of people.
We’ve seen airline email privacy glitches being shared on Twitter where passenger email addresses have been exposed.
We’re all human, mistakes happen, but when you’re already faced with mounting costs and passenger dissatisfaction, the last thing you need to deal with is an additional PR problems.
Well, the last email I received from my airline was three hours ago confirming my flight for tomorrow, the question is, do I risk phoning the contact centre and getting a different answer?
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