Skift Take

Social media has evolved to become another platform to provide customer service, but it needs to be well understood before brands dive in and start tweeting. Here’s what they need to know.

Recently, we released a new report in our Skift Trends Reports series, titled “Social Media Customer Service Strategies in the Travel Industry, where we look at how travel brands are adapting by structuring their teams and departments to deal with volumes of inquiries in a personalized way.

Below is a short extract. Get the full report to understand this new trend.

Customer touchpoints will continue to widen with further integration of social messaging and mobile-friendly apps that are more conducive to real-time feedback through alerts and push notifications and an on-call customer care specialist dedicated to fulfill- ing holiday travel wishes and personal mile- stones. This capability goes beyond logging into Facebook and Twitter on a mobile device.

American Airlines Advantage provides its Executive Platinum members with access to a more personalized version of its Passbook. It allows high level guests to direct messages to its social care team on Twitter, cutting out the fuss. In addition, these mo- bile apps cut out an extra step to reach a live representative by phone at the
reservations desk at the customer contact center or the hotel itself. Brands are finding innovative ways of integrating their content, support channels and services internally and externally.

Since social media doesn’t sleep and some- one is always awake on the other side of the world, more brands will organize its team to provide worldwide, 24-hours a day customer service with a diverse multi-lingual team.

These skills will be more sought out in the future as companies continue to leverage its existing talent pool’s expertise.

There is still a lot of work to be done in optimizing and benefiting from big data mining and analyzing efforts. As more brands harness the information that already exists in the public, there will be more opportunities to learn from customers and bring those conversations back to the community to further deepen the knowledge of more customers. In addition, these efforts are now being tied to the brand’s KPIs.

As the volume of social conversations rise and there is more information to track, the need to automate the nature of conversations will be more sought out. Specifically, further development in capturing sentiment that unlocks sarcasm, will enable teams to appropriately tag conversations for analysis.

Buy the Report

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