2013: Wishes for smooth journeys – CNN
They asked for a wish for 2013, so I decided to go to an extreme.
Johnny Jet and Flight Delays Part II – The Tech Guy with Leo Laporte
Johnny Jet was kind enough to praise Cranky Concierge on Leo Laporte’s show last week.
In the Trenches: When the Power Goes Out – Intuit Small Business Blog
When I was in Indiana during the holidays with a snow storm approaching, I started to think about what to do if the power went out.
Yesterday in the first part of my interview with Jonathan Pierce, Director of Social Communications at American Airlines, we talked more about strategy and composition of the social media team. Today we get into some more specific details about how they use specific social channels, how they handle crises, and yes, why they require people to sign a contract to get American to pin their content on Pinterest.
Cranky: I know I focus on Twitter because that’s the one I get the most utility in, but you talked about all the channels you participate in. How do you view those channels and what do you use them for?
Jonathan: Well I think with some hindsight, one of my key learnings this past year is looking at 
social as a portfolio of different channels rather than just lumping everything together as social media, having a strategy duplicated for each. That doesn’t work. So we have a strategy for each channel.
Twitter is primarily customer service and media relations led. Customers come to us before or during their trip with questions about their trip experience.
Facebook is much more about growing the brand and providing an opportunity to talk about what’s happening in the business and share stories. With the Facebook wall, there is the opportunity for customers to come and share their views and it gives us the ability to handle those directly.
LinkedIn I feel right now is more a B2B tool for us. There’s also a large number of employees on that site, so we are increasingly using it for recruitment.
Google+ is fascinating really because we have a very large number of international based folks from Asia and the Middle East active in that channel, more than US domestic. Our content strategy is more about international relevance.
YouTube is a repository of video content, obviously, and I think increasingly we’ll use that for sharing different types of video and we’re hoping YouTube continues to improve the metrics we can have on the type of video content that is being shared by our customers. How we’re using YouTube, I don’t know if you’ve seen our behind the scenes video series. We love that series. It’s doing really well for us. YouTube’s role for us is helping to give a lot more character behind the brand and giving insights to our customers about the decisions that are made.
Pinterest and Instagram they kind of play a similar role. Pinterest really is just about sharing visuals. Where we have interesting visual content it goes up on Pinterest. We’re also experimenting with promotions. Destinations, aircraft imagery go very well.
Cranky: Let me ask you a more specific question. The customer service function seems to be working well, but I’ve been critical about the response to the seat maintenance issues and a few things that have come up. I haven’t seen much discussion of that through social channels. Can you talk about your strategy when those instances happen?
Jonathan: The important thing to remember during an evolving situation like the seat issue, a crisis that’s impacting the brand, is that it’s evolving very quickly. During that time, when something is evolving so quickly, we have a much broader customer communication strategy. Because social is just one part of the communication channels American has available. There’s email, AA.com, social, sales, corporate, agency relationships, and it’s very important to have a consistent story and for one channel not to be sharing information at a different level, a different time, a different level of detail than another channel. Because the customers in a specific channel, we have an obligation to be sharing it with everyone at the same time. This is evolving with experience and actually going through these incidents. Our strategy now is to have a central customer communications plan. Particularly with the seats issue, is to have an aa.com official website as the central content hub for the incident. That’s where the latest media statement, facts that we’re showing to the customers are posted. Then it’s the responsibility of each different channel to point to aa.com.
Cranky: It sounds like it puts your team in a tougher place, because things to happen quickly but the back and forth is much quicker. There’s a static statement on the website but in a vacuum you wouldn’t want to do that if you didn’t have to worry about the company strategy.
Jonathan: You’re absolutely right. We’re caught in the middle between the media response and the customer response. We have to have a company statement but we also have to connect the dots with customers. Social is really driving a lot of the company responsiveness and we are really driving the ability to connect customer and media organizations to be more responsive.
Cranky: I have a couple of random questions here and then I’ll let you go. I’m curious about your relationship with the legal department. A few months ago I remember getting a couple page contract requesting that I could sign it so you could pin my content on your Pinterest page. I’ve never seen that from anyone else. I couldn’t sign it either because the way it was structured, it said you could do anything with my content. I’m curious if you can talk about how the relationship is – does it prevent you from doing things you’d like to be doing?
Jonathan: Sincerely we have a very good relationship with our legal department. They’re there to protect us as a team, our employees and our customers. They are facilitators for us. The Pinterest example is a great one. We went to them and said “look, there’s a brand new channel. But what Pinterest requires us to do is take other people’s content and pin it on our channel. They said, “well, what if the owner of that content decides they don’t like American pinning it?”
Cranky: My last question is another legal-related issue. Some airlines have had concerns about the customer interaction through social media because they’re afraid of DOT classifying it as a customer service channel or they’ll have to take it seriously as a complaint and respond per DOT rules. Is that something that’s been a concern for you?
Jonathan: Yeah it has been a concern. We still require if a customer has a complaint, our requirement is that they still go through the official process to register and file a complaint. Once that complaint is made and there’s a file tracking number, then we can work that file, but what we can’t do is per the DOT just take a tweet and consider that a formal complaint. I think that’s the same for every airline. When somebody has an active file reference, we’ll take that customer into direct message to get that information so we can work the file.
Cranky: Well that’s all I have for you.
Jonathan: Let us know next time you need any support and the team will be here for you. We’re hoping to extend our hours in the coming weeks and months, so as that happens we’ll be sure to let you know and give you a heads up.
Cranky: Is the ultimate goal to be a 24 hour operation?
Jonathan: It is, yes. We don’t have a specific timeline for that but we’ve hired more folks in the last couple of weeks and they’re being trained right now. We just gotta get them competent and up to speed and comfortable and then the next goal for us is to become a 24/7 operation.
Cranky: Thanks again, I appreciate you taking the time.
Jonathan: Thank you sir.
Last week, I had the chance to speak with Jonathan Pierce, the Director of Social Communications for American Airlines. I like what American has been doing particularly with Twitter, so I wanted to learn more from the man behind it all. Even after trimming the interview down, it still ended up being long enough that I’m going to split this out over two posts. Today, you’ll learn more about how he ended up in the job and where he wants to take the team strategically. Tomorrow, we’ll get a little more into specific issues, including how they handle crises.
Cranky: I appreciate you taking the time to talk. I really like what you’ve been doing on Twitter and in general in social media. When did you start at American?
Jonathan: It’s actually been 11 years now. I came over from London, as you can tell from the little accent, in March last year to take on this position. I think you’re aware we sort of dabbled in social and our agency partners at Weber were helping us community manage and helping social response. We very quickly realized in order for us to truly grow and social to be integrated in the business and offer customer support, we had to create an in-house team. That was our early focus, early last year.
What differentiates American from other airlines is that we have created a, sort of a cliche, but it’s a one-stop shop for the customer. No matter what you come to us for on Twitter or Facebook or other channels, we want to have a team in place that can handle it there on the spot.
Cranky: So you came over to Ft Worth and started putting this team together. When did you get the point where you felt you were at a good place with the team? Just trying to think how long this took to put together.
Jonathan: We hadn’t decided upon the strategy when I came over. There was a period of understanding the expectations of the role from the business perspective but also what our customers were saying. The volume of conversations, where they were happening, getting to know people on the team and then just pulling my thoughts together. That was probably a six month process before we started making the moves to work with different functions across the organization. I think we started in August of last year to take a couple folks from our reservations department and train them up, retrain them on understanding how to transfer their skills into a public written environment which is a very different skill-set. So we were up and running by September last year and we’ve continued to grow the team since then.
Cranky: For this initiative, where did the mandate come down from? Was this a top of the chain thing? Was it marketing?
Jonathan: We’re housed in the communications group, not in marketing. It really came down from our Vice President of Communications, who at the time was Roger Frizzell and my current VP is Andy Backover. The leadership comes from him for ultimately where social is going and advocating that.
Cranky: So there had to be buy-in from elsewhere, otherwise you’d never be able to pull people from reservations, right?
Jonathan: I mean, that’s really my job. My job is to go and win hearts and minds across different parts. I spent lots of time on presentations to help them understand what is social, how it’s impacting the company and customers. Reservations, I was very fortunate, has a leader who understands social very well and understands the impact. So we partnered together to find the resource. My job since then is to work with supporting functions, so like flight service, maintenance, and cargo, those kind of groups who we occasionally get questions for but really it’s about how processes are going to be integrated.
Cranky: The idea is that if somebody writes in to you, you want to be a front door so you have the resources to go elsewhere and get answers.
Jonathan: Correct. At the moment, you take your reservations agent who previously only used to do reservations. We’re also cross training in broader skill. They now have a basic understanding of customer relations, media relations, baggage services, AAdvantage customer service. They’re able to handle the large majority of general customer inquiries. It’s only when it becomes more specialized, or a legal issue that they route the customer elsewhere.
Cranky: Are they housed within the reservation team still or have you pulled them out?
Jonathan: I’ve pulled them out. The headcount still resides in reservations, but they have effectively relocated to a different part and they are full time working for me in a different building.
Cranky: Are there special tools? Is there something about the workspace that’s different?
Jonathan: Not yet, no. But we’d like to go that way eventually. The reason why we relocated them is we just wanted everybody talking to each other. To have a reservations person sitting next to somebody in customer relations and media response, we’re able to respond in minutes instead of hours because people can just share knowledge.
Cranky: Tell me about the make-up of the team. How many people and what areas?
Jonathan: We’ve grown extremely rapidly. We’re now at 15. It’s not a number I like to share simply because it’s evolving so quickly. Nine of those are customer service. How it works is there are 6 reservations folks, 2 customer relations folks, and a manager who handle the customer service function. The other six is myself, two community managers who manage all the channels we’re on (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Facebook, Google Plus, and YouTube). Managing that portfolio, messaging strategy, content strategy, etc. We have two folks who are doing promotions, engagement, video, and then we have one person who is dedicated to analysis, monitoring reports, metrics and capturing what the customer is saying about the brand, trends, and relaying that internally and also using the insights to optimize our posts, optimize our content, and generally provide dashboards on what the customer is saying.
Cranky: I imagine you use that to sell internally.
Jonathan: You’ve got it. It’s a critical role.
Cranky: With this team, do you have an end goal or is evolving?
Jonathan: It’s still evolving. The end goal really is for American to be a social business. My vision of what that is is for us to be a lot more closely connected to the entire customer experience. As we continue to roll out wifi across the fleet and we give our flight attendants and pilots and agents devices to stay connected, my vision is that the social team is that are a lot more connected to the point of delivery of customer service. If you tweet while you’re sitting on an aircraft, we’re able to see that tweet come in and find the people who are delivering that service at the point of customer service and close it out very quickly. The technology enhancements that we’re making as an airline are starting to connect those dots. That’s where I want us to go in the next 12 to 18 months. In the meantime, we’re really just focused on continuing to bolster our customer service, inspire travel with the content we’re sharing, and just understanding our customers more who are coming to us on social and doing a better job at segmenting them and figuring out who’s who. And how impactful their voice is, and ultimately understanding who these new influencers are within the social space.
Cranky: It sounds like maybe the toughest work is internal, connecting the pieces together and getting them to work together.
Jonathan: I won’t say it’s the toughest, but for an organization of this size, there’s a small amount of people who really truly understand what the customer is saying on social channels but a very large number of people who have to understand the impact of it and how it can ultimately change their world, so it’s really just a case of time and persistence and working through the organization and helping key people adopt it.
Cranky: I want to go back to the point about flight attendants getting tablets. Have you been intimately involved with this process?
Jonathan: No, I haven’t been intimately involved. It’s a vision of mine that the logical next step is as our agents improve and have more devices that they can be connected as well. I think it’s an opportunity for us to improve our communications to provide a more personalized customer service. It’s not something we’re actively developing right now but it’s something I’m aiming to achieve.
Look for part two tomorrow.
One of the more contentious customer service issues in the airline industry has long been around how airlines deal with people who have family emergencies. This comes in a lot of different forms. Some people may need to buy a ticket at the last minute to get to an ailing family member 
or to a funeral. Other times, a trip might be interrupted due to an emergency back home, requiring a change of plans.
Either way, this kind of thing usually means shelling out a fair bit of money to buy a new ticket or change an existing one. While some airlines will give you a bit of a break in these situations, most won’t. That rubs some people the wrong way, but I’ll argue that the airlines shouldn’t be giving people a break here except in rare instances.
The Elusive and Annoying Bereavement Fare
Traditional legacy carriers tend to have bereavement fares, but they are far less common than you might think. For United, it’s a 5 percent discount off the published fare. For others, it’s a filed fare that’s a discount off full coach. That, however, may often be more expensive than other discounted fares in the market. For the most part, these fares aren’t worth it because of the hassle involved. As Seinfeld fans know, you need proof of the emergency.
This might mean bringing a copy of the death certificate or a doctors note. In other cases, you can provide the details of the funeral home or hospital and the airline can follow up directly. This might sound callous, but let’s be honest. People will try to take advantage of this kind of discount if proof isn’t required.
But the bereavement fare is sort of a vestige of the past. It used to be that last minute travel was very expensive while planes were empty. So airlines knew that they could discount fares for bereavement travel and fill up a seat with someone who isn’t going to pay the full fare.
Less Need for Special Fares
Travel today is different. In markets with low cost competition, the spread between the last minute fare and the advance purchase fare is less than it used to be. And airplanes are a lot more full. So the result is that most low cost airlines don’t bother with bereavement fares at all. Customer service stars like Southwest, for example, do not do anything out of the ordinary.
Should airlines have these kinds of fares? I’d say no. While personal tragedies are awful, they happen all the time. At last check, about 7,000 people die in the US alone each day. Many, many more get sick. And there are multiple people wanting to travel for each tragedy. So while it seems like an incredibly rare situation when it happens to you, in reality it happens all the time. This isn’t a one-off type of exception for an airline to make. It’s a big piece of business.
Many Disagree
Of course, many people disagree with this and think that if they have a family emergency, then the airlines should go out of its way to help them get there. I just have a hard time seeing a reason for that with one exception. I would like to see airlines oversell a full flight to get someone onboard at the prevailing rate. If a flight is full and there are no other options, it could mean the difference between someone seeing a relative before they die and not. But that’s more of a corner case and it would still carry a hefty price tag.
Some think that this is crazy and that airlines should just throw the rules out the window when it comes to helping people in trouble. Here’s a recent case that we can use to discuss the point.
An Example to Review
Someone named “The Answer Guy” was in LA for a memorial service when he found out his fiancee’s father was gravely ill. They both needed to change their Virgin America tickets to get back to New York sooner.
The blog post really tries to make it sound like Virgin America is a terrible airline, but I think the airline did more than it needed to. There was a $100 change fee and a $434 fare difference to make a change at the last minute for a redeye home. The Answer Guy was livid and thought Virgin America should have let him travel on an earlier day for free.
Virgin America offered to waive the change fee but not the fare difference. And why should they? That gesture alone of waiving the change fee was above and beyond what the airline needed to do. And from the tone of the email, it sounds like he’s flown Virgin America occasionally, but he’s not a super duper fancy customer who Virgin America would want to work extra hard to keep happy.
But he wasn’t happy and has gone ranting and raving, even trying to threaten the airline with his standing as the author of “a customer service web site that is regularly read by several tens of thousands of small business owners; I expect that’s not an audience you want aware of and discussing what follows, nor the manner in which VAA has thus far handled things.”
Yeah, that’s a good way to handle the situation. Trying to pretend you’re important is never going to garner sympathy (regardless of whether you’re actually important or not).
He brings up the Peninsula in Beverly Hills as a counter example. They let him check out a day early without penalty. But that’s usually the policy at most hotels. Few will penalize you if you need to check out early. Though I don’t know the details of his rate, that’s most likely in the rules and that’s not any kind of exception.
The reality is that on that Virgin America flight, there were probably few seats left at such a last minute. There’s a going rate for those seats, and if the author doesn’t want to pay it, then somebody else very likely will. At least, that’s the general assumption if the revenue management system is doing its job.
So now I’ll turn it over to you. Should airlines make special exceptions for the many bereaved travelers or not? I say no, but I’d like to hear your thoughts along with an explanation either way.
How to Navigate Airline Customer Service in Difficult Situations – Conde Nast Daily Traveler
There was a story about a woman who missed her brother’s funeral because of a bunch of airline problems. That prompted me to write a post for CNTraveler.com about how to avoid those kind of situations if you find yourself in something similar. The original post was tough to read since it didn’t have to end the way it did.
In the Trenches: How to Be Charitable – Intuit Small Business Blog
A phone call last week got me thinking about the best ways to get the business involved in charity.
How to Prepare for Tomorrow’s Possible Lufthansa Strike – Conde Nast Daily Traveler
A bonus post this week about the pending Lufthansa strike. This one was pretty tough because nobody knew when it would happen or what flights would be affected except for the union. The union didn’t talk until 6 hours prior.
Photos of LAN’s 787 Dreamliner – Conde Nast Daily Traveler
Slide shows are usually kind of boring, so I decided to take the pics LAN sent of their new 787 and have a little fun with it.
