Social Customer Service Review – British Airways

‘To Fly. To Serve’.
Indeed British Airways is serving by flying with over 183 destinations around the world.  It is one of the largest flag carrier airlines in the United Kingdom with a fleet size of 285, the largest in the world. The headquarters of BA is in Warterside, Harmondsworth in England.
BA is probably one of the earliest players to do branding in a way so as to connect the chords with masses.  Saatchi & Saatchi made the ‘Face’ advertisement commercial for BA and is often considered to be a television classic commercial. Smiling face formed by a crowd of people. Image credits: cached.imagescaler.hbpl.co.uk Image credits: i1.ytimg.com
A player in traditional marketing is a biggie in social media marketing too with a social presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linkedin.
We thought of taking a look at the social index of BA and weighing out the pros and cons and figuring out how well they fare among their fans.
Element 1 – Tone of Messaging
BA has a formal tone of communication on  Twitter and Facebook .
On Twitter

On Facebook

Element 2 – Are they sending canned responses, without understanding the context?
British Airways does not respond to every query but when they do, they address every user with their name and respond to the issue only after understanding it well.
Here is an example as to how they respond on Linkedin:

Element 3 – Response Time
BA has a response time of around 60-65 minutes on their Facebook page but the unfortunately the page has a relatively low engagement rate of only around 1.61% (Engagement rate of  around 7% is considered to be a decent one). On Twitter they have a response time of 3.55 hours.
In our analysis we found that BA has a fair presence on social media and the majority of the negative queries were from the services end (customer care/ airline services).
A typical example would be:

Element 4 – Is brand sending personalized replies?
Yes, every interaction is on a personal level by tagging the user. However, on Twitter they do not address the use the name of the user and only use the handle.

Element 5 – Is brand following up on the complaints?
We did not come across any conversations on follow ups from BA. Rather there are a lot of queries which have not been answered.
Element 6 – Is brand answering to all the queries?
BA has a number of queries which have not been answered.


Element 7 – Is the brand present on major complaint forums?
Mouthshut.com which is one of the biggest online complaint forums in India has around 94 reviews of BA, mostly negatives 🙁 , however none of them has been responded by the brand.

Element 8 – Is brand sending duplicate replies?
No BA does not send duplicate replies; they customize their messages to each and every query- a good practice indeed.
While analyzing BA’s social media strategy we found that there is a lot of potential to improve on their social CRM. Being an airline brand, they are ought to listen to both negative and positive feedback from their fans. What surprised us the most was that BA’s timeline was not open to public for posting, which is not a good practice as per standards.
Also, by increasing the response rate and well-timed interaction they can improve the overall services and experience with customers.
When was the last time you traveled by British Airways. Tell us your story.