Mr. Arrignton’s flight on Delta or where CRM, Social CRM break.

I was reading recent post written by Michael Arrington on his less than pleasant flight experience SFO-JFK-SFO on Delta airlines and I was thinking how broken all the processes are – all those processes that should integrate back end, front end and social echo systems to enable companies to provide excellent customer experiences to those people who pay for their services.

Let’s look at Michael’s experiences:

I bought a first class ticket, which is one of the small luxuries I’m willing to pay for in life. This was a last minute purchase and the flights were around $1,500 each way.

Don’t you think that every single person at the airport who interacts with Michael during his trip should be aware he paid that much money? Does Michael care, that security people are not employees of Delta airline or should he care?? How difficult it is for airlines consultants to create an integrated business process that impacts overall customer experiences during the whole process of flying?? How hard it is to equip TSA agents with the bar scanning devices to check tickets at the security points [they check them manually anyway]? And that system can automatically check the a) the validity of the ticket; b) show status of the passenger..

These are just some of many obvious process improvements steps airlines can make …

Let’s take them a step further.

If there would be Social CRM in place and the social part would of been integrated with all processes that impact airline passenger experience.. then:

TSA folks would also be able to see that Mr. Arrington has over 34,000 followers on Twitter and his Klout score indicates his high level of influence and .. and.. and…

I truly believe that every single person who is flying is entitled to experience the best customer service with or without their social influence level, but… if you know the social influence level of your customers you might leverage that for special sales and marketing actions??? something else?? Maybe think twice before saying or doing something bad?

Anyway, you can comment on missing bags, attitude of the crew, many other things that greatly frustrate us as customers paying money.. and not getting services…

Michael have written a blog post about his experiences during this flight, post have been re-tweeted 862 times, shared on Buzz, Facebook.

The question is: is Delta listening social media channels? Will it act? How long it will take for them to get back to Michael with apologies? And most importantly when they will start thinking about overall customer service experiences and doing right things to start improving them?? How they can implement the culture of CARING?