KLM is proud of its excellent customer service, but you have to fly KLM to experience it. That’s why for one week, we decided to help out travellers flying other airlines. Introducing #happytohelp. A 24-hour-a-day special KLM customer service team set out to help travellers flying other airlines… in real time. From a glass pavilion at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol we responded 24/7 to tweets from travellers who shared travel nuisances. In addition to text replies, we created striking rich content in an instant, to delight those who unexpectedly received support and to encourage sharing.

Results:

- #happytohelp accomplished a significant increase in KLM brand preference in all (8) KLM key markets we researched, except for KLM’s home market, where brand preference does not leave much room for improvement.

- 1 out of 5 people living in the researched focus countries spontaneously recognized #happytohelp

- Clicks, retweets, replies, follows and favourites on Twitter in total 2.3%.

- Total impressions generated by the #happytohelp initiative: 37+ million.

- Total video views: 7+ million.

When travellers run into problems, they start sharing it on social media. We started off with an extensive six-month analysis of travel-related tweets on Twitter. Based on this analysis, we were able to anticipate support queries of travellers. We then replied to as many tweets as possible, using KLM’s Twitter handle and #happytohelp. We did not create pre-prepared answers, because we wanted to offer genuine personal support. In addition to text replies, we created as much striking rich content as we could on the spot, to delight those who unexpectedly received support and to encourage sharing.

Strategy: Offer KLM assistance real-time to all travellers flying other airlines. Surprise them by tapping into their natural behaviour of sharing complaints on social media.

Targeting: We focused our campaign on-air travellers around the world, with extra focus on 8 KLM key markets. Most, but not all air travellers know the KLM brand. We did not want to be annoyingly intrusive, but surprisingly helpful instead. Therefore we chose Twitter as our main channel. Twitter is the most open social network and Twitter users who send out a tweet realize the whole world can read it and can respond to it.