Updates to Community Support

[Aisling]

Hi everyone, 

I’m sorry I haven’t posted for a while. I know that recently we have been hard to get a hold of, so I wanted to give you all some context and update you on our future plans to maintain the level of service you expect from us.  

How we’re working through the pandemic

Like many of you, the last few months have been incredibly difficult for our team. At the end of April, we were down to 2 minute wait times for the majority of calls globally and were hopeful that we were over the worst of the storm. Unfortunately, we also had to take the difficult decision to reduce our Community Support workforce to reflect the decrease in bookings and contacts. 

In the meantime, the virus continued to spread, impacting our teams all over the world. Our Specialists have been required to continue working from home which, as you can imagine, creates technical challenges with phone service. Unfortunately, these shifts in how we can work have meant that only half of our team is able to take phone calls. 

This is why our wait times are much longer than our normal 30 seconds to 2 minutes. I know you expect more from us, and I’m sorry for the inconvenience this may be causing you. Do note that calls to our safety lines and neighbor support lines are still being answered within 30 seconds, so if you have any safety issues as a host or guest we are there for you immediately. 

Changes being made

• Enhancing our messaging channels. We are expanding access to realtime chat so you can reach us instantly and our messaging channel remains open as normal. 
• Preparing for when offices reopen. Reopening offices is a complex, location by location decision. The safety of our team members will always be most important. We’ll also consider factors such as the incidence of Covid-related cases in the area and government guidance.

I know many of you are worried about your reservations, whether you’re a host, guest, or both. We continue to monitor the global situation and are encouraged to see travel starting to come back in some countries. That said, the situation remains dynamic and challenging in many places with local governments updating their policies and restrictions daily. 

If you are in any doubt about a reservation, do check your Host dashboard or your Trips page, which provide a variety of options including how to cancel if you need to. We ask that guests work directly with their hosts if they may not be able to keep a reservation and encourage them to re-book with the host for a future date if possible. Some reservations are eligible to be canceled under our extenuating circumstances policy, so do check the Trips page for your options and our Extenuating Circumstances pages for more information

Again, I hope you are all keeping safe and well. 

Aisling

[Linda108]

@Aisling  It is always helpful to hear from the Administrators and I do believe most hosts understand how the customer service has been impacted.  However, the information provided about call wait times does not seem to go with the guest postings on this forum.  Perhaps there are some additional guidelines for guests and hosts in calling customer service you could share.

[Aisling]

Hello Linda, we're sorry that those trying to contact us are struggling to get through and having to wait. We can see from our data that some community members are waiting much longer than others which is something we're working hard to address. Our main challenge is a reduction in the number of our team that can handle phone calls due to their work from home environment. There are also the chat and messaging channels which we are ramping up staffing on weekly. I hope this helps.

[Mike-And-Jane0]

Hi @Aisling . When I follow the safety lines link above and say, after many clicks that I feel unsafe I eventually get to a phone number which is, I think, the standard number for the UK. Is this number really going to get answered quickly?

[Aisling]

Hello @Mike-And-Jane0, when using the Help Centre in the app or on our desktop site you can select to get support for a safety concern. Once you select this you'll be given two options. You can either message or call us. When selecting call, you'll be answered quickly as we have a dedicated team looking at urgent safety issues. These calls are typically answered in 30 seconds. Hope that clarifies things. Take care.

[Donald-and-Frank0]

Baloney! Hour to an hour and a half wait time for a rep!!! Insane. Move over to VRBO and I'm through in a few minutes. These "difficult times" make it all to apparent as to why VRBO charges higher fees.

I will be leaving Airbnb once my final booking through them is settled. Air is holding a guest's FULL RENTAL FEE for a whole year so I don't want to penalize the guest any more than Airbnb is doing.

[Mark116]

Maybe I'm stupid, but I looked yesterday to find the messaging channel so send a message about a non urgent issue, and I could not find it, I could not find any way to send a message to airbnb and I must have spent about 15 minutes looking for it. 

[Huma0]

@Mark116 

You have to click through numerous pages to find it and there are different paths, but one is to:

- Click on Help

- Click on Go to Help Centre

- Scroll down and click Contact Us

- Now a new window should pop up where you can select the relevant reservation or a link for non-reservation related issues.

- You will then have to click through a few pages of options to specify what the issue is before you will be given the option to call or to message.

- Click on the latter and the message window should come up.

[Mark116]

@Huma0  Thanks.  You know what's crazy?  That your explanation was more clear than the admins.  It took me again at least 5 minutes to find the 'views' part under performance.  The whole analysis part is a completely insane mess of extraneous data that is not needed and the basics are hard to find and hard to understand.  Sad. Ah well, I think we may end up moving to long term, e.g. 1 year lease as no matter what we do the algo keeps us at the bottom of the results. 

[Huma0]

@Mark116 

Yes, I agree, there is a lot of data that seems extraneous, at least to me, and I question much of that data, as it doesn't really make sense.

Anyway, there shouldn't be so many steps/complications to go through just to contact Airbnb about an issue or see how many views you've had.

I wonder, why are you at the bottom of the search results. Do you use Instant Book or not?

[Aisling]

Hello @Mark116, if you're using our app or desktop site you can access messaging once you visit our Help Centre. There you can access support whether you're hosting or a guest. In the Help Centre we ask community members what they need help with solving. By navigating through the various options you'll notice you can always select 'contact us' especially when you see 'I still need help'. Once you've clicked on that you can write a message to us and we'll reply as soon as possible. We're always looking to improve accessibility for community members needing support so we'll also take your feedback back to the team.

[Huma0]

@Aisling 

The problem is that you have to go through so many pages before you get to the point where you can actually send a message. Sorry to be cynical, but the site seems to be set up so as to make it so complicated and time consuming that many users will just give up before they ever get to sending that message.

 I know Airbnb is not the only company to employ these tactics. It seems to be becoming commonplace to try to dissuade customers from making any sort of direct contact but, if you are going to go down that route, then the search functions that encourage you to go to help articles need to be improved. It is very rare that I find any relevant answer to my question or issue from the results that come up in those searches so, inevitably, I end up needing to contact an Airbnb rep.

[Aisling]

Hello @Huma0, thanks for your feedback on this. The system is designed to help hosts get a quicker resolution to their issues by providing information for them to check before getting in touch with us, but of course there are some occasions where people will need to get in touch with us directly. We are not trying to make it harder to contact us, but we are trying always to improve our support pathways. We have a big product effort underway to improve our help centre as well and ensure our community gets the right answer to their questions as quickly as possible. I am sorry you've had difficulty reaching someone. Do let me know if you need someone to reach out.

[Helen3]

How do you access the Live Chat option @Aisling 

[Huma0]

@Helen3 

I used this the other day, but I am not sure how I got there as I was trying to send a message to Airbnb and the chat window just popped up instead!

A word of warning though. I did not find this the most effective way of dealing with a problem. The rep couldn't identify what the cause was and said she would pass it on to another team and then just disappeared. She didn't close the chat, nor ask if she could help with anything else. She just disappeared. After about an hour, I closed it as it was pretty obvious she wasn't coming back. I haven't received a follow up message about the case (saying we are looking into it etc. etc.) which, in my experience, means no one is actually looking into it.

So, I guess I will have to call up instead.