Setback for the social customer

Paul Greenberg is on a crusade to educate the corporate world about the social customer. His new book, his seminar series are all aimed at that. As he is quoted in my upcoming book “Social CRM measures not just Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) but Customer Referral Value (CRV)”

So, based on the negative stream this weekend from Kevin Smith (Silent Bob) who has 1.6 million Twitter followers, it would appear to be a big FAIL for Southwest Airlines when it comes to CRV.

First, much as I admire Southwest and have written positive blogs about them, not sure they even do CLV right. Their front line and reservation agents have no way to distinguish a one-time flyer from the frequent flyer (I know I have qualified for their highest level – a free companion pass – 6 years in a row). This is part of Southwest’s “democratic” mindset which treats everyone equally but makes them insensitive to the fact that Kevin, besides having a huge CRV also has a impressive CLV.

But Kevin’s behavior in going and on and the language he used frankly makes this incident also a FAIL for the social customer. Let me elaborate.

Southwest has a “customer of size” policy - basically if you cannot lower both armrests around you – 17 inches wide – they make you buy two tickets. You can argue it is insensitive (though Southwest argues they get plenty of complaints from inconvenienced passengers who sit next to “customers of size”) but it has had this policy for for almost 3 decades. In fairness, if the flight is not full, they refund you the second ticket.

For some reason they let Kevin board on one ticket on a full flight. Then once he was settled in his seat they asked him to get off the flight. And apparently did not handle it as discreetly as they could have. If things had stopped there and Kevin had posted a calm, but hurt, post everyone would have sympathized with Kevin. But he chose to spend days talking about it.  Then when Southwest explained that Kevin knows the 2 ticket policy from his previous travels with the airline, Kevin claims they violated his privacy for letting the world know that he knew that policy. Sorry, this social customer just qualified as a whiner abusing his soapbox. 

This is not Dave Carroll and his guitar episode which United Airlines ignored for months till his song hit big on YouTube. Southwest was monitoring the Twitterfeed and tried to placate Kevin almost immediately. They did what Paul is telling companies to do with the social customer.

In return though, us social customers need to learn to talk softly. First resolve the issue directly with the company we have with. Then gradually turn to the big stick in our hands called our web community. If we just throw on-line tantrums, we are only making Paul’s crusade that much tougher.