Comments on: 2 more cents on Kevin Smith vs. Southwest

By: Matthew Petro

Matthew Petro — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:34:43 +0000

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.

By: Matthew Petro

Matthew Petro — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:34:43 +0000

By: Jose Gonzalez

Jose Gonzalez — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:20:38 +0000

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.

By: WesleyTech

WesleyTech — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:02:31 +0000

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.

By: diane

diane — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:49:59 +0000

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.