Customer Service in Social Media: An Empirical Study of the Airline Industry

Abstract

Until recently, customer service was exclusively provided over traditional channels. Cus- tomers could write an email or call a service center if they had questions or problems with a product or service. In recent times, this has changed dramatically as companies explore new channels to offer customer service. With the increasing popularity of social media, more companies thrive to provide customer service also over Facebook and Twitter. Companies aim to provide a better customer ex- perience by offering more convenient channels to contact a company. In addition, this unburdens traditional channels which are costly to maintain. This paper empirically evaluates the performance of customer service in social media by analysing a multitude of companies in the airline industry. We have collected several million customer service requests from Twitter and Facebook and auto- matically analyzed how efficient the service strategies of the respective companies are in terms of response rate and time.