Customer engagement taking off in airline industry?

Airlines so often hit the customer service headlines for all the wrong reasons. In fact, even when they offer a textbook example of how to react to a customer service disaster, this can be overlooked. (Credit therefore goes to Lior Arussy who was generous enough to hail JetBlue for its efforts last year.

So I'm pleased to hear that another airline is grasping the nettle, with the news that Southwest Airlines is employing an innovative use of Twitter to handle customer complaints.

Good stuff Soutwest Airlines! In fact, this isn't the first time that we've doffed our cap to the firm. Only recently we highlighted how it was also using multiple blogs to interact with customers.

Companies such as Virgin Atlantic have worked hard to build a reputation for customer service, so it's interesting to see an airline really putting customer engagement under the spotlight. I'll be watching with interest to see if this is a trend that will really take off in this sector - or if it's just an anomaly.