Kevin Smith vs. Southwest Airlines… | News Askew
It goes without saying, this is a complete mess. Let’s count the ways Southwest did wrong here. First off, and probably the biggest one, is the fact that they took Kevin’s pass and allowed him to board the flight. Even if Kevin made a flight change, the airline didn’t have to board him if they didn’t want him on the plane. In looking at Kevin’s earlier tweets, his initial anger stemmed from the fact that they took his ticket, got him seated, settled and buckled in, luggage stowed, THEN wanted him to leave the plane? Ridiculous. The proper way to handle that, if they truly felt he was a “safety risk”, was to not take his ticket and get him on a different flight. Still an inconvenience, but a LOT less inconvenient than what happened last night.
Let’s talk about the whole twitter situation as well. Companies around the world have embraced the use of Twitter as a way to track customer satisfaction. That’s good. However, Southwest has really hurt themselves by trying to handle this situation in such a public way. If they MUST say something, a simple tweet would suffice. Their continued reassurances of trying to handle the situation just makes it look worse. Why? Let’s say you or I had the same thing happen and tweeted it. Would the SWA twitter account bat an eyelash towards us in public? Not a chance. Would they contact us in private to try and resolve? Maybe. But that’s the way to do it. It doesn’t matter if your client is Kevin Smith, Joe Schmoe, or Bill Gates — Don’t go out of your way to try and impress us with all this public concern because the customers’s got a platform of 1.6 million to talk to. I’d like to think that if I had a gripe with Southwest, they’d do something to help me out as well. You just get the feeling they’re doing this for him, but for John Q. Public, there wouldn’t be nearly as much attention given. As of presstime, they’ve even issued a blog about the incident which completely ignores the most essential aspects of the story — Kevin flew on their planes, both ways, in a single seat of the aircraft, without incident. They also neglected to mention the most imporant part – They BOARDED him, SEATED him, filled up the plane, THEN asked him to get up and leave? Come on.
So in short, and this goes to all of those companies monitoring a twitter feed – It’s great if you want to use twitter to monitor customer concerns, but take your actions to resolve them private. We’re sure that customers who get stuff straightened out would be just as happy to tweet their positive experiences back as well. Let the customer do it — Don’t try and make an example of how far you to help people, unless you do it for EVERYONE, not just those of us with millions of fans on twitter.
