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
