Not so fast: Here's more on airline responsiveness via Twitter

A new analysis on airline responsiveness on Twitter by the team at Conversocial shows the top performers as far as speed of customer service on the platform. Of course, each of these social customer service studies come up with its own results (see here and here). The interesting tack for this study is the way the sample was created: the analysis took the top 2,001 @ mentions via the Twitter API, scrubbed the slowest 5% of responses, and then racked each airlines in terms of simple responsiveness. That simplicity is key: when a customer is tweeting at an airline, they are readily seeking relief from a problem, and therefore response time is paramount. This is made clear by certain airlines, such as KLM, that post an expected reply time that updated every 5 minutes.

The study looked at the top 20 airlines in North America and Europe, and took a time period of one weeks' tweets to analyze. So how do the airlines rank according to this one metric? European airlines While the report breaks down each individual airlines performance, with the fastest and slowest response times, here is the report's breakdown of the results:

@Iberia was the most responsive European Airlines on Twitter, replying to 41.4% of all mentions.
@Iberia once more stood out with the fastest response time, responding to one social question in just 28 seconds.
@Lufthansa had the best average response time–answering questions over social in 15m and 37s on average .
40% of European airlines are considered responsive to brand mentions on Twitter.

Iberia's overall performance was steady and fast:

On the flipside, the UK's flag carrier didn't do so well, posting a low 40 percent score on responding within one hour:

North American airlines

North American airlines performed far better than their European counterparts, with every single airline responding within an hour at least 50% of the time.

The North American highlights from the report are as follows:

@DeltaAssist impressed with the fastest response time, responding to one social question in just 8 seconds.
@AmericanAir was the most responsive North American Airline on Twitter, replying to 65.6% of all mentions.
@AmericanAir has the best average response time–answering questions over social in 4m and 2s on average .
90% of the North American airlines are considered to be responsive to brand mentions on Twitter, with the exception of Southwest Airlines who only responds to 1.7% of all mentions.

The lowest performer as far as number of responses under one hour was Canadian low-cost carrier WestJet. Here's how responsive that brand was in this particular Twitter sample:

The top performer, as mentioned above, was American Airlines.

The airline has doubled-down on its social strategy in advance of the upcoming merger, and is continually showing improvements in approach to customer service on social. Most notable is the brand's response to 100% of messages within one hour, a feat accomplished by no other airline in the sample.

Southwest Airlines posted surprisingly poor results in this particular sample, judged as "not very responsive" due to the fact that they only replied to a dismal 1.7% of all @ mentions from customers.