Airbnb Customer Support Service Design
Project Scope
Exploratory Research
Workshop Design
Service Prop Development
Concept Development
Evaluative Research
Service Blueprinting
Technical Capabilities Analysis
Product Design
Socialization
Opportunity
Customer Support is a core part of Airbnb’s customer experience, helping guests and hosts resolve issues that arise for Homes, Work, & Experiences that range from getting a password reset to urgent safety situations. Our team was tasked with designing the future of Customer Support in order to unify and advance the service offering across whole platform, alleviating long wait times and unresolved issues.
Solution
Our team worked collaboratively across Airbnb’s customer support organization to create a unified approach to Customer Experience Support delivery. We designed the strategy for segmentation and triaging of issues, identified pathways to resolution for a range of situations—from trivial to critical—used a holistic service blueprint to visualize the journeys, roles and processes, and identify new tool concepts to deliver a great customer experience.
Adoption and buy-in were critical for the Airbnb team, so we also helped them socialize the new strategy in a unique pop-up event that allowed 300+ global CS leads to see, feel, and respond to the strategy. The result? After 1 year, time-to-resolution went from weeks to minutes (with 80% of issues resolved in under 1 minute) — redefining what best-in-class customer experience support looks like for a global platform that serves 150million people in 190+ countries.
The team developed feature, tool and program concepts. These concepts were tested with guests, hosts and support team members and then iterated upon.
Service propositions were developed, describing how the Customer Support team would deliver service and the value their service would provide. These were used to organize existing concepts and drive further ideation. Each service proposition contains several feature sets that deliver on the proposition in different ways.
Several key journeys were mapped creating service blueprints. The top part of each blueprint outlines the actions and interactions between the guest, host and support specialist across the journey. The bottom part identifies the the proposed tools, feature, and programs that will support each part of the journey and the processes, policies and technology needed to actualize them.
Adoption and buy-in were critical for the Airbnb team, so we also helped them socialize the new strategy in a unique pop-up event that allowed 300+ global CS leads to see, feel, and respond to the strategy.