Community Support during COVID-19

[Aisling]

Hello everyone,

My name is Aisling and I manage our global Community Support Team. Over the past three months, we have been hit by an unprecedented wave of challenges due to the spread of COVID-19.

My job is to ensure that you and the rest of our community have the support you need, especially at this difficult time and make sure we have the resources in place to do so. However, at a time where support is needed even more than ever, our team has been faced with some of the hardest challenges we’ve ever experienced.

In light of this, I wanted to share some of these experiences with you and most importantly what we’ve been doing about it and what we are currently working on.

Sudden and unprecedented volume of calls

As you may know, we have offices and support centers in locations across the world, but we rely on all of them to help with the volume of support we receive. The challenges we’ve seen here are:

• Our China team was the first to be impacted, dealing with volumes 600% above what we had planned for. The quarantine shut down our China office and one of our Customer Support sites.
• Once the WHO announced COVID-19 as a global pandemic, our global ticket volumes rose 400% above what we planned.

What’ve we done:

• The China team contributed over 100K of working hours during the Lunar New Year to manage the call volumes. We also built a self-solve and chat bot tool to manage the volume in just two weeks
• Our teams rallied and formed a task force, covering operations, engineering, legal and partner management teams, that met multiple times a day to tackle the issue

Office shutdowns

As the virus spread, all of our internal offices were required to shut down quite abruptly and all of our teams had to change to a work from home mode.

• Our partner sites where we manage the majority of tickets were also required to be shut down by the government and local authorities. This meant we temporarily lost almost 80% of our global community support network within days.

What’ve we done:

• We had to get laptops enabled and distributed to 7,000 specialists across 25 sites around the world.
• Within a matter of one week, we had moved around 70% of partner specialists to working from home

Where are we now

We’ve done a lot in a short period of time, but as you can imagine we are still working through our backlog.

• We are currently working through technical and regional constraints to enable all of our teams to connect to the phone lines.
• We are under pressure on our phone lines, in particular English and Portuguese.
• As a result, we have shortened hours of operations temporarily, but are working to get them back to normal hours as soon as possible.

We also launched a new initiative that temporarily redeploys Airbnb staff to the Community Support team to help us more quickly meet your needs. Things are moving rapidly and so we hope you see a difference in response time very shortly.

Finally...

I am incredibly proud of how our teams have rallied together in such a short amount of time to serve our community and we are all working around the clock to continue to support you.

I can’t imagine how difficult it has been for all of you with these unprecedented changes. We are here to listen and support you as much as we can. Please continue to share your feedback here in the Community Center and also through the listening sessions, I've been receiving regular updates from the community team. I will keep you posted with further updates.

Thank you for your support and patience while we get our team back on track and adjust to this new world.

Aisling

[Liv]

@Alice996

I can confirm you have cases open with the Customer Experience team, who are working on them as we speak.

I appreciate you are frustrated, but we are operating with a reduced CS team currently. Wait times are increased due to the downsized workforce, but I can assure you that you will get a response as soon as possible.

Thank you for understanding,

Liv

[Alice996]

Thank you for telling Liv because I would not have known.

This made me feel sick.

And so have some of the comments here and Liv I actually don't understand. 

[Alice996]

I have no idea what takes so long.  Its obvious I have almost all excellent reviews.

A good person doesn't fall out of character over night 

When a person writes lies about you for the public to see, in the USA legally that's called slander and it is illegal.

[Helen350]

Who has written lies about you @Alice996 ? Whilst I don't condone what your host said about your religion, that was wrong,  the review just said you were unhappy - which you were!

We all meet unpleasant people  now & then..... Try & be philisophical, have a chat with yourself & try & cheer yourself up! Think about what's good in your life! Forgive & forget!

[Alice996]

My host wrote lies about me.

[Alice996]

I give up.  The world just is cruel and hurts good people and truly doesn't care 

[Alice996]

None of you have ever met me and you don't know me.

Leave me alone.

[Sarah977]

@Alice996  Hosts have guests write lies in their reviews all the time. Usually hosts can't get Airbnb to remove the review, even if the host has hundreds of great reviews and it's quite obvious that the guest is lying.

You seem to feel that you are the only one who has experienced this sort of thing, but it isn't true at all. It happens all the time. Hosts are not going to take that bad review to heart, because you have tons of great reviews as a guest.

[Alice996]

Actually I have been reading some of the lies people write and some were much worse than mine!

Well I didn't know this happens all the time.  I'm pretty shocked.

I'm an honest person.  I just guess I also think others should be honest too

I guess nobody is much invested in that anymore

It's a sadder world than I thought (and I already thought it was pretty sad!).

I did not know this was commonplace. 

[Sarah977]

@Alice996  There have always been dishonest, nasty people in the world. But most people, I find, do their best. Try to focus on the good people and not let the bad ones get you down. If we let them disturb us so much, then we are still giving them the power. 

[Edward165]

I can

t get anybody to respond to my emails nor messages.  What do I do?

[Helen350]

@Edward165 If you mean Customer Services, many people have reported the same problem. Airbnb have just laid off 25% of it's workforce & more & more people are contacting cos of Covid.

- You could phone - some say it's easier to get thru at unpopular times of day - like in the middle of the night!

Others suggest using Twitter....  

[Cari3]

Thanks for keeping us posted on what you’re doing and how it’s helped.... but I do have a suggestion.  I’ve tried to call a number of times recently, I just gave up once again after holding on for over 35 minutes.  Don’t get me wrong... I know how challenging it must be for airbnb having to reduce staff AND have increased calls and I empathize but there are 2 suggestions that I really think airbnb should implement:  1) tell us how long the wait time is.  I hold on and I hold on and I hold on not wanting to put down because my issue is important but with no idea whether I’m going to hold on for 5 minutes or another 60 minutes is very annoying and a waste of time.  Many places warn you that the next available operator is approximately x... number of minutes away.  Great now I can decide.... should I hold on all that time or not.  2) Give us the facility to receive a call back instead of hanging on and maybe warn us that it could take up to 72 hours (or whatever) to receive call back.

[Sarah977]

@Cari3  Well, they don't even call back when a CS rep promises you that they will, so I can't see them honoring a call back option.

Nice ideas, but it doesn't seem that Airbnb cares at all how frustrating reaching CS is.

[Alison719]

What happens if a guest in self catering cottage develops Covid symptoms and has to self isolate for 14 days?