Like the airlines impacted by the Icelandic volcano last year, airlines in & flying to Australia & NZ had to contend with the challenges & disruption caused by Chile’s Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano this month (& maybe for a while yet!)

Chief among them has been the need to communicate the volatile changes in schedules to hundreds of thousands of travellers.

Volcanic ash cloud disrupts travellers

The AFR‘s Brian Corrigan wrote a great piece today. Amazingly, up till this week over 120,000 Qantas passengers alone have been affected by the ash cloud. With that volume of enquiries occurring, as Qantas spokesperson Olivia Worth said “The number of calls going to the phone lines is simply not sustainable.” The AFR quoted Ms Wirth as saying that social media had been vital to the airline’s response strategy because of the number of passengers involved. Qantas added 5,000 (60% increase) new Followers on Twitter since the disruptions began (“it’s an ill volvanic cloud that blows no good”) & an extra 10% Facebook fans. Ms Wirth said “There were many examples of people opening a Twitter account just to follow what Qantas was doing during this time. But it’s not just a way of pushing out information. It was used to interact with customers”. Apparently, Qantas has 3 staff dedicated to monitoring & responding to social media.

Meanwhile Virgin monitored over 10,000 mentions of its brand in the last 2 weeks. It has more than 30,000 Twitter followers.

It’s not just airlines that are discovering the need to manage customer relationships via social media. The speed, volatility & volume of interactions for almost any customer focused business can scale beyond capabilities at a moment’s notice. Whether it be a crisis where negative reactions need to be managed or a surprise positive opportunity (Hire car firms & hotels did a roaring trade during these same disruptions), businesses need to be able to respond efficiently, rapidly & via the channels the customers want. In this case, the social media sign up number tell the story.