KLM's In-House Expert on the Benefits of Social Media Customer Service
Skift Take
Yes, KLM is on a league of its own by being able to leverage all the social care interactions into offers and purchases, but it's still working hard to integrate all its reservation systems, customer database, and social media interactions.
For KLM, social media is about more than retweets and viral content.
The Dutch airline has invested an undisclosed amount into making sure its business model is groomed to provide the highest level of customer care on its social media channels, and it consistently tops its airline peers — some with much larger budgets — on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks.
Today, customers around the world can rely on its 150-person, 24/7 social care staff to handle 60,000 mentions and 7,000 queries a week in 14 languages: Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, and Turkish.
Skift recently talked to Karlijn Vogel-Meijer, Social Media Manager at KLM about its evolution as a social customer service beast and what happens when people are happy to help. An edited version of the interview follows:
Skift: Customer service is so visible on your brand's social media channels, how did KLM learn to become so evolved with this initiative?
Karlijn Vogel-Meijer: When the Icelandic volcano burst a couple of years ago, there was this specific moment where people tried to reach us via the traditional channels, like email, telephone, et cetera. There were thousands of people trying to reach us, and they couldn't get a grip of us. They turned to social media, where we were present at the time. We were doing some small posts on Facebook, we were present there like a lot of other brands, and we had actually not really a clue what to do there.
Suddenly, those thousands of questions came pouring in, and there was this specific moment where one of our former VPs was talking to one of the employees, and she asked him, "Listen, what are we doing to do? Are we going to answer those questions? We can do that, but please realize that there is no turning back. You cannot just be there, and then the next moment not be there. If you go ahead on that road, that is a long road with a lot of development." He, thankfully, decided to do that. We started answering our first social questions via Facebook.
That was actually the start of social service for KLM. That was beginning of everything that
