KLM’s ‘happy to help’ Twitter campaign

In an interesting take to the social media age, KLM set up a real-time customer service centre that was aimed at hijacking travellers’ Twitter feeds.KLM set up a team for six days, operating from a hub in Amsterdam. A custom-designed glass pavilion was built at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, serving as a central control hub for the international campaign, connecting Amsterdam with various airports spread across the globe.The KLM customer service team and DDB & Tribal Worldwide Amsterdam’s, team of 250 specialists worked from the glass pavilion for 24 hours each day, in shifts of 30 people at a time.The campaign launched with an international #HappytoHelp Twitter takeover hashtag, where passengers worldwide could send in questions and they would be answered in real-time by the KLM customer service team.The specially designated KLM customer service team constantly screened Twitter feeds in search for messages that indicated someone was in trouble during their travels. The team then responded with a creative and relevant #HappytoHelp answer which was personalised for each single passenger in real-time.KLM attempted to answer questions posed by people anywhere in the world, said the company.Here are some of its #HappytoHelp tweets:https://twitter.com/KLM/status/521757372000526337https://twitter.com/KLM/status/521665365961486337https://twitter.com/KLM/status/521584103544868864[gallery link="file" ids="69635,69636,69637"]Bart Mol, creative director at DDB & Tribal Worldwide Amsterdam, said: “We wanted to show how important customer service is for KLM by engaging a team of helpers ready to serve with personal advice in real-time. With this Twitter takeover we wanted to help as many people as possible, not only KLM customers, but passengers worldwide, to travel more comfortably.”Pol Hoenderboom, creative director at DDB & Tribal Worldwide Amsterdam, added that for the past six months, the team had been actively searching Twitter for the most common questions travellers asked.“#HappytoHelp was a huge international, real-time event where we actually didn’t know what questions we would run into. I can say one thing though: we were thoroughly prepared,” he said.This centre not only aided travellers on social media, but also in person at the airport or on board. KLM had stationed its staff at key airports worldwide. Those customer service teams screened the airports for people in trouble and connected with the glass pavilion team in Amsterdam to tackle any travel problems.The campaign started on Monday 13 October and ended on Friday 17 October.The airline also had film crews on standby to shoot filmed responses to customers’ problems and record footage of the most interesting and unusual problems solved, which was later aired on YouTube.