There’s a lesson to be learnt here

By Billie Andersen

There’s probably very few people who would have missed the travel disruption caused by a certain misbehaving volcano grounding planes in the northern hemisphere and turning airports into ghost towns or hotels. Thrown into the mix there are confusing accounts of which flights have and have not been cancelled and when airports will be closed, all being made worse by a second eruption. Due to the high volume of people trying to reschedule travel arrangements, websites have been breaking left, right and centre and call centres have been inundated, making the whole process an administrative nightmare.

However, Swiss Air has proven that it doesn’t need to be like this. The company is very familiar with the use of social media even dedicating a part of its site to the various social media channels the company use. The company have utilised its Facebook page to communicate updates to fans (all 7000 of them) and interacting with the Twitter community to address individual queries. This is a mutually beneficial engagement strategy. Swiss Air are able to broadcast to a sizeable proportion of their customer base, and are able to service them individually at a lower cost than by phone. Customers have access to the latest news and are able to communicate with Swiss Air, alleviating a lot of site traffic for the less socially-minded. With such satisfying customer service, which airline do you think these customers will think about first when booking their next flight…?!