Airbnb's Customer Experience practice needs a systemic change

Airbnb just released a Customer Experience Blueprint and the most comprehensive set of updates to date to its app (2). The triggers:

Brian's ~6 months in 2022 living in Airbnbs, his experience resuming hosting, and a social listening project he undertook (via Twitter ) starting Oct 2022 in addition to similar work undertaken by his team.

I captured some of the good things about this in a previous post and the not-so-good below.

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TECH/DESIGN DEBT?

Brian captured the changes in a tweet, and that list reads like things that shouldn't have needed the triggers that it did because:

• some of it is obvious*,
• some of it is already there in comparable systems (in a feature-to-niche comparison; e.g., maps v/s map, reviews v/s reviews, listings v/s listings)
• some of it is the bedrock of the industries Airbnb has disrupted (tourism, hospitality, real-estate listings...)

It is hard to digest that all of this can be ascribed to design debt in a reputedly design-led company that has been around for 15 years.

It would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall and learn how many of these changes were already in the pipeline, even before the triggers, what the lag was, and why it came to pass.

This is important because Airbnb stopped shipping changes in a continuum, instead opting for two releases per year since COVID.

*I imagine people reading this and discussing hindsight, but please read the tweet. There ARE things there that are obvious.

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BUILDING FAR FROM CUSTOMERS

And then, I dug into the history of Airbnb's experience blueprint to find that the exercise first happened in 2012 with a Pixar Illustrator supporting it via storyboarding. So now there are two possibilities that I phrase as questions:

• Why would you wait 11 years (between the storyboarding exercise and the new experience blueprint) to build 'near' customers?
• And if the team has been doing these exercises frequently, why would you let the process become so ineffective that you must now be so public about it? And so, what's a gimmick, and what's the truth?

There's definitely been a latency effect here—social listening and analyzing information from customer care lines to significant operational and strategic benefits shouldn't be a big deal for a tech company.

Companies in industries known for lagging in technology adoption have done better. Take my previous employer 联合利华 for example. The company created a veritable insight engine under the great Stan Sthanunathan , and it was good enough to have this HBR profile rendered. You may think that's gimmicky, but I used this engine for four years to inform my work at Unilever. It works, and it works well.

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WHAT OF VALUES?

There's also the question of adherence to company values and how that translates into behaviors. Why would you let the yardsticks and talismans they arm you with slip?

Be a host, Champion the Mission, Simplify (noncanonical), Every frame matters (noncanonical) ...

This mismatch between stated values and lived values (behaviors, execution) has some significance to the customer experience and service issues at Airbnb. I revisit this line of thought in the final section of this article: A Systems View.

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ORG

There also feels like an organizational dissonance vis-a-vis customer experience (on both sides/ guests and hosts). Despite the move from divisional to functional org, there isn't a dedicated customer service function.

I admit I may have missed something here, but the org charts from The Org show Guest Experience under CTO, CS Service Excellence/PM/Product Trust under Operations, and Host Experience equivalent probably (it's unclear from the organogram) under Global Head of Hosting.

This diffusion of customer experience and service roles is baffling (and it's not just about Tech vs. Offline), as is the absence of a hospitality veteran on the company board.

The company may have the right processes to complement this particular structure. Brian calls this 'putting the entire company on a single roadmap.' That it took a tweet to usher in a significant social listening exercise belies that assumption. So why is the org set up the way it is?

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INTERNAL UPGRADES & THE COMPANY DNA

Some of the questions I pose here are rhetorical. I mean, the answers are 'seemingly' out there, and I love how Brian has been transparent about these things.

He has talked about the loss of focus, silos, challenges of scaling, failure to make the change, and the need to get back to basics in interviews/profiles with various outlets.

So there's clearly a realization and some changes being made. Unfortunately, until the verdict comes down on these changes, much of this will look like a PR stunt.

However, my point is different. While the changes being rolled out are externally facing, my point is about what needs to change internally beyond just talking about the right things, upgrades, and the org rejig implemented during COVID.

Airbnb is an important experiment, and its continued success is a testimony to the kind of dreams free folks can dream and turn into reality here in venture land**.

That rare breed of post-GFC startups that began scrappily, soared in valuation, turned a profit, and debuted an IPO while retaining its founding team.

That IS a unicorn.

And so while Brian talks about going back to basics, changing things, and doing this or that, if the lessons from this saga aren't encoded into the company's DNA, these things will happen again.

You may say, "But he is doing the right things." You might be right. After all, he did say this:

We used to think [that our] product was the website.

It turns out our product is not our website, our product are (sic) the homes, our product is the community. That's what you are buying. Our website is just the store and the way you communicate with the product. And we realize we weren't even doing anything to design this offline experience.

It's an incredibly clear moment for us.

But he said this ten years ago. And yet, if you go back to the list of changes on the tweet I linked before, a lot of it sounds like a tech band-aid over offline problems. And that's taken them ten years and a tweet since the moment of clarity mentioned above.

That's not to say that nothing has happened since 2012. Many improvements have been shipped, and great experiences have been created offline.

But it isn't the five- or four-star reviewers who supply the back-breaking straw to the proverbial camel.

The worst 10% of guest and host experiences make it worse for everyone. And the whole point of the platform is to take those things off the table.

That's not me. That's Brian, almost verbatim, in his interview with Fortune last week. Something is amiss.

So what? What needs to change in the DNA?

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LESSONS

Before we talk about DNA, there are lessons to be learned (for Airbnb and other willing companies) from this saga. And I believe there are at least three lessons here:

(1) Never let scale come in the way of customer experience.

Scale your customer experience with everything else.

• An end-to-end dedicated customer experience & service practice that's staffed and 'tech-ed' for your scale (invest in that)
• Continuous monitoring of customer signals (care lines, social media, app reviews, interviews, meets, emails, chats -> NLP methods, trends, repeat rates (don't be satisfied by high FCRs), recency, experience & service issue clusters, et cetera)
• Use algorithms to match the scale. Brian talked about how AI will play a role for Airbnb and mentioned using AI to know customers better. Well? Do that. (e.g., real-time inputs to service folks on the tonality of customers on the other end of the call can help handle the emotional side of interactions. If real-time processing is too much, there is a win to be had from customer-specific insight from previous reviews, call logs, et cetera)
• Continuously monitor internal signals on this (glassdoor, blind, town halls, et cetera). Share top customer pain points on internal forums with everybody.
• Listen to your people. And you don't have to be literally flat for that organizationally. As Ishan Mahajan recently said: "The actual flat organizations don't stay away from defining an org structure. They ensure that speaking up and listening, regardless of 'position', is a part of their culture."
• Simplify customer experience and service performance metrics. Prioritize measuring customer effort above customer satisfaction, NPS, call times, et cetera.
• Remember that the host and the guest are both your customers. That's the gift of two-sided marketplaces.
• I can go on and on, but really, is anything above new? And that's what blows my mind.

(2) The basic human expectations from the industry must be met even when you fundamentally alter that industry.

We think of innovation landscapes as this interplay between business models and technological competencies. But the human angle must be addressed.

• Customers want a high RoI (R = experience, quality, earnings (for hosts); I = effort, cost) and a low I (lower than that for your competitors, wherever and whoever they are, including your institutional hosts).
• Look at what the industry was doing well already (before you showed up) and has started doing well (since you showed up).
• Lower the debt (tech & design) in relation to scale! As a scale-up, the mantra for Airbnb is "Less process weight for customers ('low I'), more permanent engineering & design fixes."
• If a niche app (e.g., google maps) has a feature, your app (probably) needs to have it (maps on Airbnb app).
• Focus on the offline experience. Don't use tech fixes to 'closet' the issues; close the issues.
• I can go on and on, but really, is anything above new? And that's what blows my mind.

(3) Some systemic change must happen vis-à-vis customer experience at Airbnb

This is the DNA piece I mentioned in the last section. Let's unpack this a little in the final section.

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A SYSTEMS VIEW

First, an encore:

And so while Brian talks about going back to basics, changing things, and doing this or that, if the lessons from this saga aren't encoded into the company's DNA, these things will happen again.

Why is that? Why do organizations forget their moments of clarity? Why does learning have so much leakage in organizations? Why do organizations often display a pattern in their mistakes, repeating their own old mistakes or those of others before them?

That's because, ultimately, organizations are systems composed of elements (people, divisions, functions), interconnections (structure, reporting lines, roadmaps, rules), and purposes (its central purpose, sub-purposes of its elements, its lived values, roadmaps).

And systems are usually resilient.

We often try to change them by changing their elements to obtain tactical gains. And that's short-lived. The ship of Theseus is still a ship.

If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory.

Robert M Pirsig

We can change rationality by changing interconnections and, even more so, the purposes, and that has the most lasting, needle-moving effect on systems.

Brian changed the interconnections via the COVID era organizational rejig and by creating a single roadmap. There needs to be some meditation on whether that's what he has talked about in public and whether it's working.

For me, however, the purpose part is the most important one, and there are two things here:

• The harmony of central purpose and sub-purposes (translation: silos and breaking thereof; putting everyone on that single roadmap is looking delectable right about now)
• The purposes (central purpose and lived values) themselves. Or, to put it differently, the mismatch between stated and lived purposes, values, and behaviors.

The second one takes the cake. That right there is gene editing.

I hear you cry 'fluff' or say Airbnb's stated purpose has remained the same, and they have had the same stated values (more or less; they dropped 'Simplify' and 'Every frame matters').

That's rhetoric and stated goals. This isn't about that.

Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.

Donella Meadows

Rhetoric and stated goals in management are usually innocuous, and there's usually nothing inherently right or wrong about them. Lived values (and, therefore, behaviors and execution) are where the knockdown happens.

So how do you avoid the knockdown? How do you encode the lessons in a company's DNA?

• Be deliberate: Update the stated purpose, goals, and/or values to reflect the lessons (I believe the above six - see image - are robust enough for Airbnb)
• Be pragmatic: Convert stated values into measurable behaviors
• Be biased for action: Incentivize the behaviors
• Be vigilant: Use behavior-backed values as guardrails for your decisions.

Example: In the image above, what does any of it mean? It's good rhetoric, but what does it translate to? And so, how will you measure that? How will you incentivize that? How will you use these as guardrails for all strategic decisions?

That, I posit, is JTBD for Brian Chesky and Airbnb

#culture #change #customerexperience

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FOOTNOTES

**This quote is a play on the toast Ronald Reagan gave at the launch of USA TODAY on September 15, 1982.

About Me

I came up professionally in customer-facing functions at a cash-strapped coal-mining startup in Mozambique run by ex-military folks:

• first internally as Maintenance Engineer interfacing with the mining department
• then externally as Mine Shift Manager interfacing with the client

Thereafter I worked at Unilever, renovating products and optimizing and designing GTM and Supply Chain Strategies in the medium, long, and very long term.

I always started with the end consumer in mind, which meant regularly consuming, processing, and using the information from Stan's insight engine I mentioned before.

About #2centweekend

I post pithy insightful statements with accompanying explanations on many Fridays via [F-ING] . You can look up past posts by clicking the hashtag.

The two cents for this Friday:

This Friday, it took an article instead of a post. I love Airbnb and have no qualms about being a fanboy of the founding team. So this had to be written.

It was written at night over diminishing returns of copious caffeine. So the narrative flow may be marred, but let's take up those inconsistencies, clarifications, and counterpoints in the comments so I can learn and hopefully trigger your mind in the process.