Social Customer Service Review – Indigo Airlines

IndiGo is an Indian airline company headquartered at Gurgaon, India. It is a low cost carrier and the largest airline in India^[2] with a market share of 31.6% as of April 2014. The airline offers 504 daily flights connecting to 36 destinations.
Indigo has a decent presence on Facebook and Twitter. On Facebook, Indigo has 283K likes and on Twitter it has 9K followers. Indigo certainly seems to be using both the channels as their customer service, where they are responding to customer queries and concerns. But sadly, on Facebook page, the brand seemed to have disabled the COMMENT on wall feature, hence it is not possible to write on their wall or be visible on their Facebook Page. The only way to request your concerns on Facebook page is via commenting on the posts made by the page.
Lets get into details of how they are responding to customer queries and complaints on social media.
Element 1 – Tone of Messaging
The nice thing about Indigo is that they have a very friendly tone to their commuication. The conversations doesn’t feel like an automated response. Further, Indigo seems to be engaging with most of their Twitter mentions and not restricting to only negative complaints. On Facebook, its quite difficult to find the complaints as the feature of commenting on wall is disabled. But most complaints can be found on some of the posts made by the page, where Indigo seems to be responding with similar flare of friendly tone.


Element 2 – Are they sending canned responses, without understanding the context?
Indigo is not using any kind of formal canned responses. This is clear from their responses on Twitter and Facebook. They are also not using the format of having the name of the customer representative at the end of the comment. Hence their responses are more like a spontaneous response with a friendly tone.


Element 3 – Turnaround Time
Apparently on Facebook page, as the Wall comment is disabled there is no response on the User posts. But the turn around time of Indigo on the post is around 1 to 2 hrs on average.
On Twitter, however they have a very fast response time of average 15 minutes. This could be the benchmark for any other airline brands to follow. (The response time is based on the sample data for 3 days which had around 213 replies from Indigo Airlines’s Twitter Handle)
Element 4 – Is brand sending personalized replies?
Driven by a friendly tone, the social customer support of Indigo is extremely personalized. Their response to tweets are quick and relevant.
 

Element 5 – Is brand following up on the complaints?
In case of following up with the complaints, there are instances where IndiGo has contacted the customer for feedback. Whereas, most of the issues are handled offline through telephonic conversation, and not all issues are closed on the social media itself. Therefore its rare to find follow up conversation on social media. But in case of website and ticketing issues, Indigo is doing a lot of to and fro conversation with the customer.


Element 6 – Is brand answering to all the queries?
Indigo Airlines is getting around 50-100 queries per day, considering their quick response time they seems to be handling every mentions on Twitter without missing them. Issues concerning flight delay, ticketing, websites, coupon and any positive reviews are attended.
The comments below illustrates the accuracy with which Indigo is responding on Twitter without having to ask more details from the customer.

On Facebook, most complaints posted on their posts are addressed. But the comments are scattered on various posts. This might be challenge for Indigo if they continue to disable the feature to comment on the wall of the Facebook page.
Element 7 – Is the brand present on major complaint forums?
Mouthshut.com which is one of the biggest online complaint forums has about 273 complaints about Indigo Airlines alone, but none of the complaints/queries seems to have been responded. Considering the quick turn around time on Twitter and Facebook, Indigo Airlines should also try to address customer’s complaint on other major forums.
Unlike on social media sites, forums provides customers to provide more details about the issues. Hence Indigo can easily reach out to the customer by using those information. As most issues could be handled offline, using these platform to drop a follow up message would be great way to show that issues are being resolved.

Further, they seem to have a genuine profile on consumercomplaints.in but the engagement on the site is very low. Despite regular complaints being filed on the site, there is hardly any active engagment with the customer.

The status of most of the complaints on the site has “complaints being notified to customer support of IndiGo”.

Element 8 – Is brand sending duplicate replies?
Considering an active social media response and follow up team. No duplicate replies were noticed.
Overall the social customer service team of Indigo is very responsible to address the issues and respond quickly. This will certainly help the brand build a strong relationship with the customers. But some of the cases were observed where it seemed as though the issue was not resolved and the customers were still unhappy. In such and many other concerns on major complaints site, if Indigo Airlines can demonstrate that they are looking into the issues and that the customer is not left out, this will do much better for the customers.