Air travel is one of the most complained about topics on social media. People complain about delays, lost baggage and everything in between. The conversation around ultra-low cost Spirit Airlines was extremely negative because people didn't understand their stripped down, a la carte business model. Until this year, twitter was just a channel for Spirit to share deals. No service, no education about the brand and no content calendar. Why? It cost them money. When costs go up, customer's ticket prices go up.
So, we decided to use this negative momentum in a positive way. Unlike the legacy airlines that pay large teams of community managers to respond to every customer moan, we simply wanted to educate customers on our way of flying. If we could start to infiltrate the conversation, we could begin to turn the hate around.
The solution was Autopilot. Autopilot powers up for one hour per day to dispense education and direct customers to educational content about the brand through auto reply messages customized to their issue. It has helped the brand enter the social space, create positive engagements and solve customer service problems before they start. All without raising the price of a ticket.
Spirit often flies on a different path than their competition to save their customers money. In the same spirit we went against social media best practices to prove our point that we are all about saving money. No giant social media team adding overhead to your flight.
We did this in a way that stayed true to the humor of the brand has while entertaining and educating our soon to be frequent flyers.
