If you’re reading this, you probably already know about the ‘mishap’, the ‘debacle’ the ‘mistake’ and whatever the people are calling it. To summarize the event, Sachin Tendulkar a.k.a ‘The God of Cricket’ tweeted about the inconvenience caused to him while traveling by the British Airways as given below:
The fans (read bhakts) went crazy when the brand replied back saying this:
If you’re eager to catch the glimpse of the fan outrage and other tweets, try going here.
Now putting the Sachin hangover aside for a while, let us revisit the event, but from a brand’s perspective. A celebrity felt he was not treated well by the brand, brand replied with a template like response… some people just found it funny, tried to troll it while the fanatics actually dragged the issue to a next level showing their outrage and labeling it as disrespect to their God by asking his full name and address.
Where did the brand go wrong? Was getting the details of a customer for solving his query a wrong thing to do? Maybe not… but now see this tweet conversation from HTC
The tweet isn’t really from a genuine celeb, but the tweets were coming rather frequently. Here is the reply by Jason Mackenzie, President of HTC America.
The cases actually aren’t exactly the same, but the point here is… can a brand give personal attention when needed?
The bigger your brand scales, the more important it is for you to manage its interaction. The British Airways already fares well on the Airline Industry Social Rankings, but here they could not recognize the conversation. To give another reference, this is not the first time British Airways has been in bad light… here is another example of BA’s good presence on digital, but a really bad CRM service.
If handled in a better way, the conversation must’ve been recognized, escalated to the correct CRM level and hence the whole event could’ve got contained in a less worse of a shape that it later became.
Sachin’s handle is one of the top 10 most popular twitter clebs in India and hence it was a predictable thing, that the issue might trend, or at least inflate to a greater extent, such that it creates a problem for the brand.
The situation was later controlled with an apology by the British Airways
and thanks to the fans, the hashtag stopped trending after 12 hours. The case is a lesson, to why a strong CRM is necessary for any brand and I hope people take some positive insights, rather than cursing BA even more… Off you go British Airways, go fly to inside the books of the MBA courses!
A Thought Blog - By Prateek Devta 
Nice take on the whole topic. Certainly it was really unavoidable to get tainted after post by SRT, but it could’ve been controlled
If you look at it closely, airline didn’t do anything wrong. Only because Sachin enjoys godlike status in India, does not mean he is different from any other customer.
The issue (even after twitter frenzy) would have died down within few hours. Certainly not the level 1 customer care issues (which a lot of international travellers) face on a regular basis.
The social media customer care team at the back can’t be stupid enough to do this without knowing the consequence. You never know, this could be intentional to get free eyeballs.
Hi Piyush! Thanks for visiting the blog 🙂
I’ll start my reply with a small statement,”People never forget, how you made them feel.”
You really won’t care about a random person facing an inconvenience, but when your family or the people you love face the same inconvenience, you are very likely to show your outrage!
Here, you made a lots of people feel bad, and hence the disaster.
I certainly appreciate how BA came up with a reply just in 15 minutes. But like John Turner says,”If I walked on water people would say I couldn’t swim.” They thought the quick response would help, but the tone of response wasn’t taken positively.
There is a possibility of the Social CRM team handling it intentionally like this, but it puts them in not so good of a picture.