2 more cents on Kevin Smith vs. Southwest

If you’re reading this post, I’m assuming you’re familiar with the Kevin Smith vs. Southwest issue which erupted on Saturday. If not, read the quick summary over at Mashable, the Southwest blog posts here and here and Kevin’s SModcast episode. The SModcast episode is nearly 1 1/2 hours long, but well worth a listen to hear Kevin’s side of the story.

The social media team at Southwest has handled the situation fairly well. They were quick to respond to Kevin’s tweets and explained the situation succinctly in their two blog posts. It seems that the situation really is the perfect storm resulting from the combination of three things: a) momentary bad judgment on the part of the Southwest employees, b) an individual who’s a prolific user of social media with a large audience and c) a sensitive issue.

The lesson large companies should take away from the incident is this: you need to be prepared for situations like this. I’m not talking about being prepared for this exact circumstance; no one could predict this. I’m talking about having the social media platform in place to quickly and authoritatively respond to any unusual situation.

First, companies need to have social media engagement occurring, period. If you’re not engaging with customers in whatever social media arena is appropriate (Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, etc), you need to, and you need to do it now. Imagine how much worse the situation could have been if Southwest hadn’t responded until executives began hearing about the situation on Sunday, or even Monday.

Second, the team of people who handle social media engagement for a company need to be empowered to make on-the-spot decisions about how to handle a situation which arises. Social media, especially Twitter, move at the speed of a text message. There’s no time for employees to get authorization from management before reaching out to a customer who’s having a problem.

Third, companies need to have developed strategies to cope with different types of problems which may arise in social media. In the example of an airline such as Southwest, they should have thought about how to handle a passenger who’s complaining while at the airport or on a plane. What can the social media team member who’s responding to the passenger offer? Can they offer a voucher? Can they offer to call the passenger directly and then hand them off to a reservations agent for reaccommodating? Clearly, Southwest has thought about this and their social media person did the best they could. The Kevin Smith situation quickly became an unusual situation due to the number of his followers and the publicity it received. Once again, Southwest handled it well, as higher management was engaged fairly rapidly.

Even with all of the preparation, an airline that’s arguably one of the best corporate social media users is still caught in a storm of controversy. No matter what a company does, social media always presents the risk that a small error in judgment will rapidly become headline news. Even so, corporations must be engaged in social media in order to react as quickly and effectively as possible.

UPDATE: Kevin Smith posted a new SModcast in which he talks with Natali, the girl who was on the flight he did finally get on and who was also treated badly by Southwest because of her size. It seems like Smith goes a little too “conspiracy theory” for an explanation for the situation, but there definitely is a customer service issue which Southwest needs to investigate and correct. Maybe the problem is company wide, or maybe it’s just an issue in Oakland, but Southwest needs to do something about it.

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View Comments to “2 more cents on Kevin Smith vs. Southwest”

diane 16 February 2010 at 9:49 am #

I think it's great that Southwest had someone using social media and they made what looks like a solid attempt to contact Kevin and make up for the situation. We- and the large planeload of other people we were with- had an *Awful experience with Delta this past week and not one tweet from Delta in reply to anyone's comments about it, as far as I know.
Note to Delta: a hug from the lead flight attendant after trying to finally escape the plane doesn't actually cut it.
WesleyTech 16 February 2010 at 10:02 am #

You're right man! The incident should definitely be a lesson to companies: you need to have a social media strategy in place, with competent people behind it! I also think Southwest did a good job responding.
Jose Gonzalez 16 February 2010 at 10:20 am #

I think you do well to advise people to actually listen to Kevin Smith's podcast. While it's obviously from his perspective, I definitely took away how rudely he was treated.

I agree that in the age of social media that companies should be prepared to respond and handle customer dissatisfaction.

I can't help but think, though, that if companies prepped their on-the-ground employees better that companies wouldn't have to employ social media as often in these quasi-crisis situations.
Matthew Petro 24 February 2010 at 12:34 pm #

I agree that companies should prepare their customer-facing employees as well as possible and Southwest has been one of the best airlines at doing that. Their customer service is generally regarded as being among the best of U.S. airlines and their complaint levels are very low. But regardless of how well an airline prepares their customer service agents and flight attendants, a few of the thousands of passengers served each day will have negative experiences.

The Kevin Smith incident was a perfect storm of badly handled customer service combined with a person who has a large social media presence and used that presence to broadcast their displeasure. I'm not saying that Smith was wrong to tweet about what happened, I'm saying that companies should heed the lesson here and realize that social media can dramatically increase the damage done by one bad experience.

To my knowledge, Southwest has never had to cope with this kind of quasi-crises and to their credit, they used their substantial social media expertise very well. Most other airlines wouldn't even have known how to react via social media, if they reacted at all.
Matthew Petro 24 February 2010 at 7:34 pm #

I agree that companies should prepare their customer-facing employees as well as possible and Southwest has been one of the best airlines at doing that. Their customer service is generally regarded as being among the best of U.S. airlines and their complaint levels are very low. But regardless of how well an airline prepares their customer service agents and flight attendants, a few of the thousands of passengers served each day will have negative experiences.

The Kevin Smith incident was a perfect storm of badly handled customer service combined with a person who has a large social media presence and used that presence to broadcast their displeasure. I'm not saying that Smith was wrong to tweet about what happened, I'm saying that companies should heed the lesson here and realize that social media can dramatically increase the damage done by one bad experience.

To my knowledge, Southwest has never had to cope with this kind of quasi-crises and to their credit, they used their substantial social media expertise very well. Most other airlines wouldn't even have known how to react via social media, if they reacted at all.