/FloThat last bit has probably done more for Lufthansa’s social media engagement than a month’s worth of carefully crafted posts.
Most airline social media teams, or ORMs (Online Reputation Management) teams, are trained to be relentlessly polite.
Social media has become an escalation channel, but it can also become a parallel customer-service queue.
But the social media response is certainly something.
And somewhere inside Lufthansa’s social media team, Flo is probably having a rather interesting week.
Airline customer service on social media has become an interesting sport over the years. Passengers take their complaints to X, airlines respond with the usual polite language, and everyone moves on. It works because it is publicly visible, and everyone wants to put on a good show.
Every once in a while, however, someone at an airline decides to skip the corporate script. That appears to be what happened at Lufthansa this week.
A passenger took to X to complain that Lufthansa was ignoring messages and emails about a payment the passenger says was approved months ago. The post tagged Lufthansa directly and asked the airline to process case C-999983-G1X8 “IMMEDIATELY”.
Lufthansa responded, and this is where things got interesting.
“We’ve already responded to you numerous times via DM on different social media platforms,” the airline said. “The response isn’t going to magically change just because you’re asking the same question on X now.” And then came the sign-off. /Flo
That last bit has probably done more for Lufthansa’s social media engagement than a month’s worth of carefully crafted posts. The post had over four million views.
The passenger wasn’t particularly impressed, either. They responded that they didn’t need a “magic response” from Flo, but wanted Lufthansa to pay the money they claimed had already been approved. They also argued that the airline’s responses hadn’t changed because Lufthansa refused to resolve the matter.
The exchange lacks important context. From the screenshots alone, we cannot establish whether the payment is actually owed, whether it was approved as the passenger claims, or what Lufthansa’s position is on the underlying case. In some cases I’ve been involved with at LH, the airline takes a long time to respond but eventually pays up. But that isn’t really what caught people’s attention.
Lufthansa essentially told a passenger that moving the same complaint across social media platforms wouldn’t change the answer. And that is a fairly unusual thing for an airline to say publicly. Most airline social media teams, or ORMs (Online Reputation Management) teams, are trained to be relentlessly polite. Even when a passenger has posted the same complaint multiple times, the response usually remains some variation of “we’re sorry to hear this”, “please send us a DM” and “our team will look into this”.
Lufthansa, or at least Flo, decided to dispense with most of that.
The response has since attracted considerably more attention than the original complaint. Today, Lufthansa finally apologised.
There is also something worth noting about the substance of Lufthansa’s response. The airline isn’t saying that it will not deal with the case. It is saying it has already responded through direct messages on multiple social platforms, and that posting the same question on X won’t result in a different answer.
The exchange also highlights one of the stranger aspects of airline customer service today. Social media has become an escalation channel, but it can also become a parallel customer-service queue. If a passenger doesn’t like the response received through one channel, it is increasingly easy to try another platform and hope for a different outcome.
Bottomline
We don’t know whether Lufthansa ultimately owes the passenger the payment being demanded. That would require looking at the underlying case, rather than an X exchange. But the social media response is certainly something. After years of airlines speaking to passengers in carefully sanitised corporate language, seeing one essentially say we’ve already answered you and asking again isn’t going to change the answer is probably why this exchange has taken off. And somewhere inside Lufthansa’s social media team, Flo is probably having a rather interesting week.
What do you make of Flo’s comments to the customer? Too much sas or just a bad work day?
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