This time it was the CNN host Piers Morgan trying to get from New York to Minneapolis and it was just not meant to be. But that is not the point. He was flying Delta (second attempt that day to fly) and their online service boasts the following.

 

And they are a follower of Piers as well. Adding to this is a third point, Piers has over 470K followers currently on Twitter.

So, the following couple of entries Piers posted on Twitter while sitting on a Delta plane might be, well not surprising, but that Delta Service did not pick this up and action this is.

Follow the action and the time line: (timestamps are Paris time)

“What an absolute bloody joke”

So, at this point it was pretty obvious that the customer here was not amused at all and that there was plenty reason for customer service to trigger an action to assist this passenger. As you might guess this did not happen and 7 minutes after that last tweet the following went out to his nearly half a million followers.

This went out after 20 minutes had passed since his obvious escalation. Keywords such as “bloody joke” and “ashamed” should have been caught be the sentiment engine and given the appropriate attention. Now the damage is done and we will surely read about this in the coming days as another example of how social media is not good for companies and how companies fail at social media. But did Delta honestly fail here?

The folks at Delta Assist had reached out to him earlier during the day as his earlier attempt to flight was failing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Piers had sent his details and he was put on the famed flight above. So, why did Delta Assist reply so well, rescheduled him on another flight and then stopped? All was looking good from a customer service angle. It appears that Delta is working hard to build a stable support channel on Twitter and by observation of their tweets and the replies others are sending this is often very welcomed. Part of Delta’s program broke down here and just happened to occur as an upset English traveler was letting his view known to all of Twittersphere.

Could Delta have done better? Surely, with the proper program in place, this may have been avoidable. Should a celebrity like Piers Morgan think twice before tweeting, IMHO surely.