KLM #happytohelp

Background

KLM was proud of its exceptional levels of customer service and wanted to spread awareness of this beyond their traditional focus markets. Rather than tell people about KLM customer care, they wanted people to experience it for themselves.

Idea

The one problem with KLM customer service was that you had to have travelled with KLM to have experienced it. The idea, then, under the 'Happy to Help' theme was to offer KLM customer care to a wider group than their own passengers and help to travellers in need.

A Happy to Help control room was set up in Amsterdam's Schiphol airport. Here some 250 people worked round the clock in shifts of 30 people at a time to screen half a million travel-related tweets in search of messages from travellers in trouble.

A passport left at home was retrieved in Amsterdam; a speedboat on the Hudson River also helped passengers with the traffic getting into New York from JFK; a motorbike in Hong Kong brought a forgotten guitar.

A video crew on the spot captured the KLM team as they responded to the problems and the videos were uploaded to YouTube and Twitter, while the experiences of surprised travellers were also shared through social media.

Results

The #happytohelp initiative generated almost 37m impressions in total. Research conducted in the focus countries showed #happytohelp accomplished a significant increase in KLM brand preference in all countries, particularly in China and the US.

On average one in five respondents spontaneously recognized #happytohelp.

Our Thoughts

Clearly KLM have discovered that social media works for them. It has allowed them to come across as people who genuinely care about customer service. That, in turn, has allowed them to put clear blue air between themselves and their competitors. In recent times they have run a ‘Meet & Seat’ initiative, allowing passengers to choose who they sit next to from their Linkedin profiles; then there was ‘KLM Surprise’, when they rewarded passengers checking in via Foursquare; and then came their ‘Lost & Found’ service with Sherlock the beagle, who has notched up 18m views on YouTube.

What impresses us is the preparation before the campaign launched. Analysing what passengers searched for and tweeted about when their travel plans were going haywire helped the team deal with those same problems in real- time when the campaign went live so they had boats, bikes and cars ready to rush to the rescue in New York, Hong Kong, Beijing and even in Amsterdam.

This really is how to do social media.