I remember the good (or inconvenient?) old days when you had to actually send out a written letter to interact with your celebrity heroes. Among this crowd, I’m probably not dating myself.
I didn’t send out too many, but I did mail a few letters in my youth to my favorite baseball players. I generally did not get a reply – except once. When my mother handed me a letter from one of my baseball heroes (it wasn’t much more than a thank you for writing), it was still a terrific feeling for a 10-year-old with an idol.
Fast-forward to the current century (ok, now I’m dating myself), and getting a reply is still a great feeling! This time, of course, there wasn’t a hand-written note going in either direction.
Here’s the scenario: I am shuffling through an airport terminal, hustling to get to my gate to board a cross-country flight to Denver. I’m a loyal Delta guy (I’m in Atlanta, after all), mostly because I get an assigned seat, and since I almost never have carry-on luggage, I can just sit and wait until the end to board the plane. Translation: I don’t like the cattle-call lines that are favored by Delta’s biggest competitor.
As I finally approach the gate, I see that Delta seems to have changed their boarding procedures. Good heavens, they have added cattle lines! Now the entire waiting area is bursting at the seams with people scrambling to get their best place in line – so they can get first dibs at the overhead bins I guess. Sure you can sit down in the waiting area, but now there’s a better than average chance that you could be head-level with the less-flattering end of a guy who needs two seats on the plane.
So I move to the back of the lines – which are intruding way into the walkway at this point, still 10 minutes from actual boarding – and I reach high into the sky and snap a photo with my phone. Then I head to my personal Twitter – aka the preferred way to complain about anything in the year 2017 – to post the photo. With the picture, I write the following: Dear @Delta - how is the me-too cattle call a good thing? Nothing but cattle lines everywhere.
I brave the lines, board the flight (finally), and by the time I take my phone off airplane mode, I already have a reply! And it actually came from Delta! They wrote: Hi Paul - the lines are an effort to board more efficiently. After replying to the tweet, they followed me.
To be frank, it wasn’t the most gratifying response, but just like when the baseball player wrote me a personal note thanking me for writing him and being a fan, it felt good to know that Delta read my complaint, processed it, responded with respect, and then followed me in case I have further interactions with the company in the future.
It is a perfect example of a social media best practice that should always be applied for businesses. If your business is on social media – and I would imagine that by this point the vast majority of security dealer and integrator companies are – you should find it necessary to provide a certain level of interaction.
Security, after all, is a customer service business. You should have someone who is dedicated to addressing social media complaints (and compliments) and writing up respectful responses when they become necessary – it is simply the cost of doing business in the digital age.
There is a flip side to my Twitter story. At the risk of revealing the whole reason for me ever using Twitter in a personal context, I sent a complaint to another company, ULine, a couple of weeks later after receiving a huge catalog – ironically via snail mail. My tweet pretty much says it all: .@uline - Egregious destroyer of the environment. Millions of catalog pages sent every day. Online only please! #wasteful
It has been two months and I’m still waiting for my respectful reply. Funny, I don’t think I will be doing any business with them...ever.
Paul Rothman is Editor in Chief of Security Dealer & Integrator (SD&I) magazine. Access the current issue, full archives, subscription links and more at www.secdealer.com.
