Taking Orders and Payments by Social Media – KLM Leads the Way

Not only can we learn a thing or two from the Dutch about dealing with flooding, we can also learn a thing or two from them about making social eCommerce easy, and a great piece of customer service.

Admittedly KLM have 130 social media agents answering about 35,000 queries a week. All working to provide a great service for their customers – not all of us can mimic that! But you don’t need that many people to offer this in your business.

KLM have always been leading the way in customer service via social media, and often innovate.

Customers have been able to book flights, seats, extra luggage via social media for a while. But they had to phone up to pay for it. This latest innovation is to allow customers to pay via social media as well.

How have they done it? A clever app? A really funky piece of coding?

No. They’ve used a very simple method that any business with just a PayPal account can replicate!

Once the customer has explained what they want, KLM sends a link to a personal checkout (just the products the customer wants) to the customer via the private messaging facility on the relevant social network (currently they’re doing this on Facebook and Twitter).

Once the transaction is complete KLM know that it’s purchased, and the customer gets their confirmation.

An incredibly simple solution that most businesses could offer with very little effort. But before you go and set this up for your business – sense check the opportunity. How much communication do you do via social media? If it’s one customer query a month it’s not going to be worth the time to set up it.