How consumers are leveraging social media to make companies listen

I recently came across the story of a disabled person’s recent customer service nightmare with United Airlines. While the initial experience was a nightmare, she was able to leverage social media and her network of connections to get a response from United Air. Since then it appears that United Air is talking with her about not only the bad customer service experience, but also what they can do to improve their disabled person’s policy. And what does this illustrate?

It illustrates that more than ever companies need to monitor social media so that they can act on situations such as the one I mentioned above and resolve it, while also taking time to listen to the customer so they can improve their services. At the same time, such an example also shows that companies need to improve customer service, specifically making it more oriented toward helping the customer and less about helping a business evade responsibility.

This example also illustrates that insensitivity to a person’s health status is something which can and will haunt companies, because people are much more likely to take the side of a person than a company. In fact, loyal customers can suddenly, on finding out such details, realize that they don’t want to be customers of a company. Now this isn’t to say every customer will leave, but certainly many will, if only because a person’s story resonates and speaks to how that person feels.

It’s good that United Air, once they were aware of the situation, made an effort to contact the person and handle this situation in as proactive a manner as they could. It shows an increased awareness of the need for sensitivity with customers and also will hopefully lead to better training of employees. Certainly the passenger who complained had every right to be unhappy with the level of service she received, and while a company can apologize and do their best to rectify a situation, it’s even better if they can train their employees to handle situations with an eye toward recognizing how their own actions can effect the company. People, after all, will remember one negative experience over ten positive experiences, so it becomes very important to think of that and be proactive from the beginning.

Categories: social influence, Social Media
Tags: customer service, disabled person policy, social influence, Social Media, Taylor Ellwood, united air