When Sachin Tendulkar tweets to you, the one thing you do not do is to ask for his full name. British Airways did just that and is suffering the wrath of a billion Indian cricket fans. To recover from this, British Airways needs to re-think the way it delivers social customer service in 2016 and beyond. There certainly needs to be more situational awareness and empathy.
The British Airways Sachin Tendulkar Twitter gaffe
Not too long ago, British Airways lost the bags of Hasan Syed’s parents – and suffered from the first ever promoted tweet bought by an angry passenger. Their stellar marketing efforts were diluted due to that one incident. Since then, they’ve started providing 24/7 customer service on social media. But now, the airline’s lack of situation awareness has come back to bite them.
Indian cricket legend, Sachin Tendulkar, had a bad experience with the airline, and tweeted about his relatives were denied seats and their bags sent to a wrong destination. The airline replied in a standard fashion, asking for his full name and details to investigate further (despite the tweet being about Sachin’s relatives). This irked billions of Indian cricket fans, who started trolling the airline online.
@sachin_rt We’re sorry to hear this Sachin, could you please DM us your baggage ref, full name and address so we can look into this for you?
— British Airways (@British_Airways) November 13, 2015
That reply by the airline opened the floodgates and trolls quickly took over as the tweet went viral across India and soon became a trending topic on Twitter.
Trolls take over
Some people gave training tips for the BA social media team.
@sachin_rt Next time travel @Emirates @British_Airways you guys need to include general knowledge also as part of training for social media — Vivek Khandelwal (@vivekkin) November 13, 2015
While others went all out to boycott the airline.
@sachin_rt @British_Airways to fly, to serve, eh? Who do you serve but yourself? You’ll soon be flying empty planes. SHAME
— IM (@ish_man) November 13, 2015
Parallels were drawn to Maria Sharapova, who last year suffered the same fate when she mentioned that she didn’t know who Tendulkar was.
Is Sharapova handling @British_Airways twitter handle?? @sachin_rt #BritishAirways — Anmol khandelwal (@Anmol8888) November 13, 2015
Only Maria Sharapova can understand what British Airways is going through.
— Dipankar. (@deep_anchor) November 13, 2015
The social media team was compared to a “bot”, due to a standard reply being posted.
Haha, British Airways’ bot asks Tendulkar his full name. He should send them a snapshot of the Ind-Eng scorecard from Chennai ’08. — Sorabh Pant (@hankypanty) November 13, 2015
Larger social customer service issues at British Airways
When we dug further, we realized that this was not a one-off. Most of the airline’s replies are standard apology messages and don’t resolve the issue at hand. The airline often gets into public arguments with disgruntled passengers. Even people complimenting the airline for good service are not getting helpful replies. There is too much re-direction going on to various website links, which sometimes may not even work!
In Sachin Tendulkar’s case, they were right to ask for the details of his complaint. But they pasted a standard template, asking for his name, rather than his relatives’ – who seem to have been impacted. That was a small oversight that snowballed into a PR nightmare in India for the airline.
It seems the Customer Relations team handling social channels doesn’t have the right levels of training, authority to resolve issues without reaching out to other teams, or even the right tools. British Airways has some catching up to do in the quality of social customer care being delivered.
Five Steps British Airways needs to up customer service
British Airways needs to understand that the travelers today don’t want to reach the airline on multiple channels. If they reach out on Twitter, the airline should be able to acknowledge and resolve the issue at hand using the same channel. Customers want to deal with one airline channel, and internally, the Customer Relations team needs to build a single, holistic view of the customer.
Here are five ways British Airways can look to catch up with competition when it comes to providing decent social customer service.
Invest in a good tool that can prioritize incoming messages automatically, regardless of platforms. In 2012, I visited KLM’s social media command center. They were already highlighting the tweets from top level frequent fliers and key influencers. That was almost four years ago. That’s how far behind BA seems to be. Tools like Salesforce and Conversocial are good for this purpose. By the way, if IT says “come back six months later”, tell them to let you just install a small tool without integration with their systems to begin with. They can integrate it later.
Invest in the people. American Airlines hires the most senior people with multiple years of experience on the social media team, to answer questions correctly. Air New Zealand hires fresh talent, and them trains them well on the airline processes on a regular basis. British Airways’ staff on the social team need to get regular training at least once a quarter, so that they are aware of the best practices – like not getting into public arguments on Twitter.
Escalate immediately. Ensure that escalation takes place immediately before responding to a high-priority message. So that it get resolved as a “special case”, and with urgency. And more importantly, template replies are not used.
Respond with empathy. Copy-and-paste replies with “We’re sorry” or “We’re disappointed” make the airline seem like a faceless entity with no empathy for the suffering of the passengers. British Airways needs to be more human in their replies.
Work closely with Corp. Comms. Often, social media channels are handled within airlines by the Marketing or Customer Relations teams. But when things blow up on social media, like in this case, Corporate Communications needs to be involved since they have expertise in dealing with incidents that may impact the brand overall. The social media team did not seem to have worked closely with Corp. Comms in the past, and doesn’t seem to do it today too.
Hopefully, the next time Sachin Tendulkar, Lionel Messi or Kobe Bryant sends a tweet to British Airways, they not be asked for their full name just because that’s how it is in the guidelines.
The post British Airways’ Sachin Tendulkar Twitter gaffe surfaces larger social customer service issues appeared first on SimpliFlying - The Leading Airline Marketing Consultancy.
Author information
Shashank Nigam
CEO at SimpliFlying
Shashank Nigam is the CEO of SimpliFlying and a globally sought-after consultant, speaker and thought-leader on airline branding and customer engagement strategy. He is also the youngest winner of the Global Brand Leadership Award and has addressed senior aviation executives globally, from Chile to Canada and from Sydney to San Francisco.
Shashank's perspectives have found their way into major media outlets, including CNN Travel, CNBC, MSNBC, Bloomberg UTV, Mashable and in leading publications like Airline Business, ATW, Aviation Week, and others.
Shashank studied Information Systems Management and Business Management at Singapore Management University and Carnegie Mellon University. Hailing from India, he splits his time between Singapore and Vancouver, among other cities.
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