{"id":3961,"date":"2013-11-03T08:09:38","date_gmt":"2013-11-03T16:09:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jett.in\/?p=3961"},"modified":"2013-11-05T03:44:34","modified_gmt":"2013-11-05T03:44:34","slug":"experiment-long-united-americanair-take-reply","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/first2board.com\/wanderlusty\/2013\/11\/experiment-long-united-americanair-take-reply\/","title":{"rendered":"Experiment: How Long Do @United and @AmericanAir Take To Reply?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>disclaimer: i&#8217;m no statistician or &#8220;social media expert&#8221;. just a guy and the twitter API.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>there&#8217;s one thing i think we can all take as a fact: people are increasingly turning to social media to talk to brands, whether it be compliments or complaints or cries for help. as a <a title=\"I Just Made United 1K. Now What?\" href=\"http:\/\/first2board.com\/wanderlusty\/2013\/10\/26\/just-made-united-1k-now\/\">loyal United flyer<\/a> (well, no-longer-loyal, given <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=united+devaluation\">recent changes<\/a>\u00a0&#8212; see my quick take on everything at the bottom of the post), i&#8217;ve watched the <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/united\">@United<\/a> twitter account get more and more active over the past year (yay!) but also watched as <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/americanair\">@AmericanAir<\/a>\u00a0really engaged my fellow travelers (lucky ducks). one of my complaints to the marketing and social media team at <a title=\"I Am No Longer a MegaDO N00b\" href=\"http:\/\/first2board.com\/wanderlusty\/2012\/11\/16\/i-am-no-longer-a-megado-n00b\/\">last year&#8217;s Star Alliance MegaDO<\/a>\u00a0was that tweets would go ignored or take forever to get a reply to.<\/p>\n<p>anecdotally, while UA has upped their twitter game, they still seem slow to reply, and they&#8217;re not as engaging as AA. since i don&#8217;t have the time to run a sentiment analysis or other lovely things i learned in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de\/en\/courses-of-study\/courses-of-study-at-the-sfs\/international-studies-in-computational-linguistics\/international-ma-programme-iscl.html\">grad school<\/a>, i decided to write a little application that would just look at recent replies in each account and see how long it took. of course, this is not the only metric by which to judge a customer service twitter account, but it&#8217;s definitely an important one, especially when people who are already underway in their travels use twitter as their first line of communication.<\/p>\n<p>to reiterate, i&#8217;m just looking at time to reply, not content or quality of tweets or outcomes.<\/p>\n<h3>round 1<\/h3>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/first2board.com\/wanderlusty\/files\/2013\/11\/chart.png\" alt=\"chart\" width=\"619\" height=\"320\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3993\" srcset=\"http:\/\/first2board.com\/wanderlusty\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/48\/\/sites\/48\/2013\/11\/chart.png 619w, http:\/\/first2board.com\/wanderlusty\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/48\/\/sites\/48\/2013\/11\/chart-300x155.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 619px) 100vw, 619px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>the data<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>retrieved the most recent replies from each account, some time between 11 pm and midnight Pacific time on Saturday, November 2.<\/li>\n<li>calculated for 96 tweets from @United, 97 from @AmericanAir<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>the results<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the average time it took for @United to reply to a tweet was 64.07 minutes<\/li>\n<li>the average time it took for @AmericanAir to reply to a tweet was 10.33 minutes<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>i don&#8217;t think i need to run a t-test to demonstrate there is a statistical difference based on the replies i analyzed (but i did, and there is).<\/p>\n<p>oh, if you&#8217;re wondering about that American Airlines spike, that one i did look into because it really stuck out &#8212; the tweet that was being replied to did not @-mention @AmericanAir but used a hashtag instead. may or may not be excusable, but at least it&#8217;s an explanation. by the way, a spot check of United showed they replied (after 69 minutes) to a tweet that didn&#8217;t @-mention them or hashtag.<em><br \/>\n<\/em><\/p>\n<h3>round 2<\/h3>\n<p><strong>the data<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>dismayed at the numbers from last night, i did some spot checking this morning (7 o&#8217;clock hour, Pacific) and saw that reply times improved greatly, so i got fresh numbers.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/first2board.com\/wanderlusty\/files\/2013\/11\/chart2.png\" alt=\"chart2\" width=\"518\" height=\"328\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3994\" srcset=\"http:\/\/first2board.com\/wanderlusty\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/48\/\/sites\/48\/2013\/11\/chart2.png 518w, http:\/\/first2board.com\/wanderlusty\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/48\/\/sites\/48\/2013\/11\/chart2-300x189.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 518px) 100vw, 518px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>they replied twice to a tweet from two days ago regarding the devaluations (imho at two days you might as well give up or it looks like an afterthought). i took those out:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/first2board.com\/wanderlusty\/files\/2013\/11\/chart3.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/first2board.com\/wanderlusty\/files\/2013\/11\/chart3.png\" alt=\"chart3\" width=\"518\" height=\"328\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3995\" srcset=\"http:\/\/first2board.com\/wanderlusty\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/48\/\/sites\/48\/2013\/11\/chart3.png 518w, http:\/\/first2board.com\/wanderlusty\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/48\/\/sites\/48\/2013\/11\/chart3-300x189.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 518px) 100vw, 518px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>the results<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>with the two outlier data points removed, the average time is 45.05 minutes, but you can see that many of the times are sub-10 minutes.<\/p>\n<h3>conclusion<\/h3>\n<p>depending on time of day, it can take @United over an hour to reply to a tweet. granted late-night isn&#8217;t rush hour, and again, i&#8217;m not delving into the content of the tweets, but i can imagine that a good handful of tweets are related to flights about to begin or already underway where critical and timely information is necessary. i&#8217;d like to hope that the quick replies are to those who need them, but i can&#8217;t be sure. on the other hand, when they&#8217;re in their stride, it looks like @United can match @AmericanAir&#8217;s reply times (semi-consistently), so based on these two samples, time of day and, i&#8217;m assuming staff (specific people or staff numbers, i&#8217;m not sure) can have a large effect.<\/p>\n<p>if you need immediate attention, it&#8217;s probably best to try to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.united.com\/web\/en-US\/content\/Contact\/default.aspx\">contact them another way<\/a> &#8212; or send off a tweet and then call.<\/p>\n<p>on the other hand, keep it up, American! i&#8217;m jealous of the twitter service and attention you provide to your customers. unrelated to reply times: this may be just how @United staff are trained to be, but it seems like they are so stoic. just skim the replies from <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/united\/with_replies\">@United<\/a>\u00a0and compare them to those from <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/AmericanAir\/with_replies\">@AmericanAir<\/a>. doesn&#8217;t AA look more excited and engaged? jealous. maybe United flyers just don&#8217;t tweet things @United can get excited over?<\/p>\n<p>all the regular caveats go regarding sample size and data source, e.g., tweets only from two focused points in time, etc. a pretty unscientific study, but at least my (and others&#8217;) suspicions have some footing (blurred to protect the innocent, though they&#8217;re public tweets). i&#8217;d like to hope that this morning&#8217;s improvements are not anomalous and this is the kind of response times we will get throughout the day as United continues to improve (i hope) their twitter service.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/first2board.com\/wanderlusty\/files\/2013\/11\/Untitled.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/first2board.com\/wanderlusty\/files\/2013\/11\/Untitled.png\" alt=\"Untitled\" width=\"476\" height=\"701\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-3996\" srcset=\"http:\/\/first2board.com\/wanderlusty\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/48\/\/sites\/48\/2013\/11\/Untitled.png 476w, http:\/\/first2board.com\/wanderlusty\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/48\/\/sites\/48\/2013\/11\/Untitled-203x300.png 203w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 476px) 100vw, 476px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>update<\/strong>\u00a0in case you&#8217;re wondering <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/jonk\/status\/397032768636329985\">how they each replied to the blog post tweet<\/a>&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>p.s. in case you&#8217;re wondering how i feel about the recent devaluations, i say United is a business and they need to make business decisions. i was expecting the (relatively) merry days of MileagePlus to come to an end sooner or later and i&#8217;m not taking it personally (though i wish it was the year after my 1K). they are losing my loyalty but that shouldn&#8217;t surprise them given the type of flyer i am. so yeah. it&#8217;s a business decision on both our ends. no hard feelings!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>disclaimer: i&#8217;m no statistician or &#8220;social media expert&#8221;. just a guy and the twitter API. there&#8217;s one thing i think we can all take as&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":3993,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"Experiment: How Long Do @United and @AmericanAir Take To Reply? #travel #travelblog","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[12],"tags":[64,666,758,765],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v19.13 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Experiment: How Long Do @United and @AmericanAir Take To Reply? - Wanderlusty<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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