Matt Bendett explains how his company keeps customer service scores high while scaling from hotels to residential listings. Early product gaps forced the support team to build empathetic processes and templates that became core to the culture. Residential hosts need education and day-of training because they lack the built-in hospitality infrastructure of hotels.
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I was curious how you guys prioritize customer service. Because if you look at platforms like Airbnb and VRBO, this seems to be something they're really struggling with. They both have a 1.3 score on Trustpilot. You guys have a 4.4. So clearly, you're doing something differently for the better in this area. And for our use case, I'm curious because we have 4 to 10 hour hotel rates, and we would love to expand it so that consumers can host their apartments and homes eventually. But the part that worries me a little bit is how do we open it up to that and still provide good service? We don't have to worry about that with hotels right now. So how did you guys focus on this and keep it good?
That's a good question, Jared. I think I'd like to say that it just evolved as part of the company's culture and DNA that the customer experience was really important to us outside of the product and the day of experience. And I think part of that was just because we were so constrained on the product side in the early days, we had to step in and we had kind of our, what is our CX customer experience team? Like part of their job was like, also helping to make sure that everything went well and kind of maybe even being a little bit, you know, too in customers' faces in those early days. And I think that just like evolved over time into really caring about the customer experience as we scaled and as the, you know, more features in the product did come online and we got more inbound ticket volume. There were a lot of things that we, the users couldn't do, which would normally be, you know, a shitty experience that like you can't, you know, I guess for a long time maybe you couldn't cancel your booking or you couldn't, you know, we didn't have cleaning fees in the product. And so we had to take these transactions on the side through our support team. We would then build, you know, processes and templates around all of that. And we would always have like a first principle that we needed to be human. We needed to be, you know, empathetic and not come off in a robotic way. And so maybe that was just because it took some time for the scale of the business to grow that kind of the CX team was able to catch up alongside it. But we really invested in that part of the business. And I think that's something that really gives marketplaces a leg up. Especially if you're constrained on, on the product side, you know, is what, where do your operations team, like, where can they step in and add more value? And I think it's really about just making sure that every customer has a great experience and wants to come back. And so as that pertains for a business like yours, yeah, you, you have a very consistent, reliable resource in hotels right now. Because they're built on hospitality. And if you start working with residential, you probably need to do some host education there, training on what the day of experience needs to be. And then you can't rely on that on your own. You have to be like ready and prepared to, you know, help customers out if anything does get mixed up or there's missed expectations. So I don't know. That's what I would say is it just, it was a, it's a key focus. And it's not to say that for a company like Airbnb that it's not, it might be that there's the scale of their operation is so massive that like no customer experience team of that size, you know, can do what a company like Pure Space can do. I don't know.
