Lithium Technologies: Social Media Introduces New Challenges For Airlines
Lithium Technologies GM Asia Pacific Andrew Sandes, explores how social media channels introduce new challenges for airlines. These include: extreme customer expectations; unpredictable and high volumes and noise during one off and crisis events and; a high risk/reward ratio for customer management. Mr Sandes discusses how crises can produce volume surges in social media postings, and how Lithium can assist with dealing with this.
Transcript
Andrew Sandes:My name is Andrew Sandes. I'm the General Manager for the Asia Pacific region at Lithium Technologies, and we're very proud to be invited here today to talk about crisis management on social media in the airline industry. It's an area where we have a great track record, and we're really privileged to be able to help some of our airline customers to effectively manage, you know, unfortunate incidences which do impact their brands and their ability to service customers. So we work with a lot of different players in the travel and hospitality industry. Airlines are a key focus for us at the moment. We work with United Airlines, Delta, Southwest, and Jet Airways in India, and we primarily manage their social media customer care activities and allow them to route the right cases to the right agent, or the right eyeballs as we say. To deliver an appropriate response and to do that at scale. A lot of the challenges that airlines and hospitality industry players, the challenges they face are around how to focus on the cases that matter and people that need immediate help and make sure that those people get help in an appropriate timeline. And on social media, that timeline is often immediate for people that are having a personal crisis, like they've missed a flight They've missed a connection, they need to cancel or change their hotel room details. You know, these are all reasonably urgent from a personal perspective, and the brand needs to understand that urgency and be able to respond. So look, bots and automation are an important part of a lot of our customers' digital self-service strategies. This primarily covers their activities on social media and messaging platforms. Lithium integrates with whatever bot vendor or AI vendor of choice that our brands choose to work with through public APIs. And the strategy around bots is often to help customers self-service so that the bot can triage that initial inquiry. And if the bot can't help solve that inquiry without the case having to go to a human agent, that's a win for the customer and it's a win for the brand as well. Digital self-service is also a really strong theme across the value that Lithium delivers through through all of our products. That includes the social media customer care and social media publishing side, but also the online communities. So a lot of our customers use what we call a peer-to-peer community to deliver self-service and get assistance from other peers. So Southwest Airlines is a great example of one of our travel and hospitality clients that has both our social media products as well as our online community platform. Without wanting to get too technical, there's a few key platform features and functionalities that help us to deal with a crisis in an efficient way. We have the ability to do retroactive tagging and routing so that when a crisis appears, perhaps it's UA3411, for example, where United had a very high volume of social media posts over a 24-hour period, Our platform can look back in time and tag specific inquiries and posts that meet a certain criteria based on keywords and route those away from agents, route them into a separate queue, and really segment those so that the agents are focusing on people that need help and anything that's noise or people just piling on through that kind of viral social media crisis, that those are all segmented away. And the agents can focus on customers that have a genuine need and there's genuine action required by the brand. Proactive crisis planning is very, very important. We have a lot of thought leadership in our company. There's a gentleman named Dave Evans who's written the white paper that we've shared with our audience today. Dave is a global expert and we share that knowledge with all of our customers, not just in the airline and travel and hospitality industries, but really across the board. And the luxury of working with 700 brands globally is that we get to soak up a lot of best practice and share knowledge amongst all those customers. And I think that, that benefits all of our customers to be able to proactively create those strategies, soak up best practice from around the world, and really help each other to get better.
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