Business Studies

Digital Marketing Topic 7 Q4
Review the “Focus on Customer Service: Southwest Airlines” topic resources. Do you think the approach used by Southwest Airlines is effective? Why or why not? Are there ways the airline can improve? Justify your answers using the topic resources and your own research.

ANSWER

Effectiveness of Southwest Airlines Customer Service

In my opinion, the approach that has been taken by Southwest Airlines as described in the “Focus on Customer Service: Southwest Airlines” resource is effective in providing excellent customer service through the social media platforms such as Twitter. Notably, the approach by Southwest Airlines to use social media platforms.  In this case, they use Twitter to offer customer service to their customers because Customer service is one of the organizational operations that businesses use to adapt to increasing competition, attract new business prospects, boost profitability, improve market access, and boost customer satisfaction (Janahi, & Al Mubarak, 2017). Southwest Airlines this customer satisfaction achieves by providing quick responses through their social care personnel who respond to the tweets and messages from their customers within a brief period of ten to fifteen minutes. This is a great strategy since some of the customers who send their queries to the support team expect a quick response time.

In addition, Southwest Airlines’ customer service is also unique in that its social media staff is merged with its Rapid Rewards loyalty team, allowing users to link their Twitter handle to their frequent flier account. Arguably, Organizations utilize loyalty programs as a systematic customer relationship management tool to develop and extend customer-supplier relationships (Alshurideh et al., 2020). They are able to reward their frequent fliers through the same Twitter handle where they are also conducting their advertisements, enabling them to reach more clients.

On the other hand, I suggest that Southwest Airlines should invest in more social care personnel to ensure that they offer a much better response time of about five minutes since clients expect an almost instant response from airline companies since some of them make inquiries while at the airport and could be at risk of missing a flight.

References

Alshurideh, M., Gasaymeh, A., Ahmed, G., Alzoubi, H., & Kurd, B. (2020). Loyalty program effectiveness: Theoretical reviews and practical proofs. Uncertain Supply Chain Management, 8(3), 599-612.

Janahi, M. A., & Al Mubarak, M. M. S. (2017). The impact of customer service quality on customer satisfaction in Islamic banking. Journal of Islamic Marketing.