Creating a social media presence for your company is more than just setting up a Twitter and Facebook account. There’s also more to it than just posting updates and announcements and a very good example of this is airline company KLM’s social media managers. Speaking to John Koetsier at VentureBeat, the company revealed that their social media managers have managed to nab the company about $25 million in annual revenue.
According to the company’s social media manager Gert-Wim ter Haar, “Social is more and more becoming a profit center. It’s first about service, then brand and reputation, but also about commerce … we have to make money.” For example social media can be where customers turn to when they are faced with problems.
It could be tickets that fail to be booked, a bad flight where a staff member was rude, payments not being accepted, and so on. This is where social media managers shine and by attending to these customers and their needs, such as helping them book tickets manually, they are helping to retain customers and generating revenue at the same time.
According to ter Haar, KLM is faced with about 70,000 queries a week day in and day out, with the 150 social agents having to deal with customers from all walks of life and speaking about 14 different languages. The company has also launched more channels via messenger apps such as WeChat and are currently conducting a test using WhatsApp, which last we checked plays home to about 800 million active monthly users.
[Image credit – Andrei Dimofte]
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