Delta Absolutely Nails It With A Celebrity Moment On One Of Their Planes!
The new media world is really quick to jump on airlines when they do something wrong. How many cellphone videos have you seen over the past couple of years showing airline employees behaving badly? I’m guilty of showing more than one or two here. We don’t see enough of the better kind of social media stories involving airlines. Maybe that’s because there aren’t as many. Or, maybe they’re less fun to cover, don’t generate as many “clicks”.
Delta Air Lines Wins The Day With A Celebrity Customer
Big thanks to Jay, a long-time reader for sending this one along. Delta’s social media team recently won the day with how they reacted to a customer complaint. This wasn’t a run-of-the-mill customer. Rapper T-Pain was onboard a flight and complained about the music onboard. Here’s what he had to say:
https://twitter.com/TPAIN/status/1045845662489698306
Delta’s reply, less than 20 minutes later was spot on. Whether through Google, or because the employee knew who T-Pain was, they nailed the reply:
About a week later, T-Pain was on another Delta flight. The flight attendants on that flight played “Buy You A Drank”, a song T-Pain released in 2007. I reached out to Delta and confirmed that flight attendants did really play the song. As you can imagine, T-Pain approved:
The Final Two Pennies
It’s incredibly hard to run a large airline. Communication across teams spread throughout the world is challenging at best. Customers speak dozens of different languages and have hundreds of different needs. When an airline can take a moment to personalize the customer experience, they generate such goodwill. Most people aren’t expecting it, so airlines probably get outsize value for surprise and delight efforts. T-Pain is already a loyal customer. But, can you imagine how many people he tells now what a great airline he thinks Delta is? Not to mention 1.5m Instagram followers and over a million Twitter followers…..
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Small things like that really stand out in people’s minds… and I bet that small gesture really cost Delta very little if anything to do… but for some, they’ll remember it for years to come.
Your observation covers just about every customer contact moment. It can happen in a grocery store, a restaurant , or a clothing store. If more businesses paid attention to the small stuff, …well…lets just say this type of response does not happen often enough.
Jay, I had a great conversation with a flight attendant last night about this exact point. One small gesture can make a huge difference to customers.
Trevor, things like this go so far with me. Doesn’t take much. These aren’t difficult. And, maybe Delta does more of these but they just don’t get the same sort of social media coverage.