We made many changes to turn our Social Media Engagement team from transactional to engaging/relationship building. Not only did we want to provide customer service help, but also wanted to become trusted experts and advisors.
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Company: United
Entry submitted by: Natalie Kempa (Social Media Engagement Manager)
Social channels: Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
Lithy category: Social Support Champion
United Airlines and United Express operate approximately 4,500 flights a day to 337 airports across five continents. In 2016, United and United Express operated more than 1.6 million flights carrying more than 143 million customers. United is proud to have the world's most comprehensive route network, including U.S. mainland hubs in Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, New York/Newark, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. United operates 743 mainline aircraft and the airline's United Express partners operate 478 regional aircraft. The airline is a founding member of Star Alliance, which provides service to 190 countries via 28 member airlines.
Social Customer Service Initiatives
Using social media as a means of customer service has become extremely normalized. Customers have become accustomed to the formula of getting assistance from businesses: post loudly on their channels until a customer service representative responds to your issue.
Given social's transparency and visibility, there are high stakes regarding how quickly and how sufficiently customer service representatives handle customers' inquiries. United recognized that simply having a strong customer service presence on social media is no longer industry-leading.
We wanted to improve the customer experience by also using our social media accounts to recognize positive events in customers' lives. We wanted to take our customer service presence further than social media by integrating it into the real world for our customers. And, of course, to power this we needed to have the basics down – process, people and the technology.
In 2016, we made many changes to turn our Social Media Engagement team from transactional to engaging/relationship building. Not only did we want to provide customer service help, but also wanted to become trusted experts and advisors.
Our goal for 2016 was for our Engagement team to quickly and effectively handle customers’ inquiries. One of the steps we took to ensure this was changing our technology to Lithium, which allowed us to address conversations quicker by auto-tagging and more effectively by utilizing priorities.
Social Customer Service Approach
With Lithium Social Media Management (SMM) for Service, we now have the technology in place to manage millions of posts, and this enables our Social Media Engagement team to work efficiently and effectively. The technology helps with:
The Results
In 2016, we made big improvements in our average response time, responses and customer sentiment.
In terms of response time, our average response time has dropped from 280 minutes to as low as 52 minutes (year over year) – that’s an 81% decrease in response time.
Our team is also now able to respond to even more people on social channels like never before. We went from responding to 19,000 to over 47,000 people per month, doubling (2.4X) the number of customers we respond to.
Lastly, we positively increased our net sentiment from -15% in 2015 to 6% in 2016.
One of our biggest achievements is that we now have the people, process and technology in place to manage large spikes at scale. In fact, we recently hit 250x our daily average and could maintain day-to-day service level (SLAs).
Big drops in response time
Considerable increases in outbound responses
Helped positively increase our net sentiment by 21 points
Year |
Net Sentiment |
2015 |
-15% |
2016 |
6% |
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