Social customer service in the travel industry

The enormous challenges that social media poses for traditional tour operators was highlighted in Florence at the final conference in the WTM Vision series on Friday.

Speaking on the closing panel, Angelo Cartelli, sales and marketing director of Eden Viaggi, said that travel companies now had to listen carefully to what their customers were saying in social media channels and react quickly.

Cartelli said that if people on Twitter or Facebook were talking about a new destination that they wanted to visit and wanted to go there for four days over a weekend rather than the traditional seven day Saturday to Saturday then it was incumbent on tour operators to offer that.

He added that travel companies also need to listen to negative feedback about hotels. “If guests are sitting in a hotel and tweeting that they don’t like it, you need to resolve that immediately. In the old days, travel companies might hold onto a hotel for the whole season even if the guests were unhappy.”

This voice of the customer is something I spoke about at the WTM Vision Conference Florence conference too. To see my presentation click here.

Over the past few years, that voice has become deafening. Patients turn up at doctors’ surgeries armed with details of what they believe is ailing them scoured from the internet; holidaymakers arrive at travel agents or hotel websites with a clutch of Tripadvisor reviews.

Increasingly, those views are gathered from people in your social networks. It is becoming something of a cliche but social networks have allowed word of mouth to go global. Travel companies ignore that at their peril.

The logical conclusion of all this could be even more worrying for travel companies: they may need to go even further and use social media in real-time to customise their service offering on the fly.

On a recent visit to the John Kent Institute in Tourism at Bournemouth University, I spoke to PhD researcher Nicolas Gregori who is looking at how real-time enabled social media can be used for designing services “on the spot”, pro-active personalisation of service offerings, identification of service complaints and subsequent recovery service failures.

What this means in practice is that if someone tweets or posts a status update complaining about their hotel room being too hot or cold, someone from the hotel will monitor it and act accordingly to keep the guest on side.

But to deliver social customer service in the future, travel companies are going to have to do much, much more.

When you are a global travel brand being mentioned thousands of times a day, throwing people at the problem is unlikely to be practical. Technological tools to monitor and prioritise depending on how loudly a customer is shouting – and their influence on social networks - may well be the only answer.