Recently Southwest Airlines was thrust into national limelight after asking Kevin Smith to get off a plane after he was seated with luggage stored overhead.  Kevin Smith first tweeted about the event only moments after it happened and with 1.6 million followers the story quickly went viral.  While the treatment he, and other overweight people, have received from Southwest Airlines was demeaning it brought to light other customers who had struggled getting answers using Southwest's customer service.

Heather, (JustHeather on Twitter), is one of the customers who tweeted about her adventure with Southwest and her unhappiness with how she was treated by the customer service agents.  Heather's last flight left quite a bit to be desired; the flight itself was fine but her luggage was a casualty.  She flew Southwest Airlines with a brand new set of bags with no mars of any kind on them.  When she retrieved the bags at the end of her flight; both bags had been ripped open on the back.  Luckily, her contents were safe.  Heather attempted to reach out to someone at the airport, but was unable to locate anyone.  Later she reached out to customer service who told her she should file a report, but didn't tell her how to file the report.  As a last resort, she reached out via Twitter.  Until Kevin Smith shone the light on Southwest Airlines; Heather was unable to get any real response from any agent of Southwest Airlines. Christi, the twitter voice for Southwest Airlines, has not told Heather twice that a customer service agent will be calling on the phone to help get the damaged bags resolved.

Heather stated that: "Social media has to be an extension of good customer service. It can't fix it or replace it."   This is definitely a case of social media being replaced by good customer service.  While Southwest Airlines may have a heart as their logo and the word "LUV" in their motto - they definitely are giving or getting much love from their customers after the lack of customer service.

Nicole (nickelnm on Twitter) is another dissatisfied customer of Southwest Airlines.  She took a flight home at Christmas time to visit family and Southwest didn't even actually get her family to their final destination.  She ended up driving an extra 3 hours in order to make it all the way to her destination.  Once she was at her destination and started unpacking the bags that her family had picked up for her at her final destination airport she found that one was missing.  It took Southwest Airlines three weeks to locate the missing bag and another week for it to arrive to Nicole.  Once it did arrive via FedEx Nicole found that all of the handles had been ripped off the luggage, and several items were missing from he inside of the luggage.  Most important of these items was an internal computer hard drive.  Nicole has repeatedly reached out to Southwest Airlines via customer service, lost baggage, and Twitter and until Kevin Smith drug the airline into the spotlight no one had responded.  In come Christi to the rescue; she quickly answered Nicole on the day that Kevin Smith brought the twitterverse to Southwest's virtual front door and assured Nicole that if given all the information a customer service agent would research it and get back to Nicole.  Forty-Eight hours later and still no response from a customer service agent.  Nicole feels like Southwest Airlines needs to take responsibility for what happened.  "I paid them to get my family and my luggage from point A to point B and they were unsuccessful on both sides of that requirement."

Nicole and Heather both have blogs related to saving money and helping families do more with less.  Heather can be found at http://inexpensively.com and Nicole at http://moneycrusade.com