It’s a universal experience to have something go wrong that shouldn’t have seemingly without any ability to correct it.
It’s absolutely maddening to be able to prove something shouldn’t be but the person or people who could, and even should, fix it won’t listen.
Everyone hates it, but it’s something that’s all too common in customer service. How many of us have sent off an email or filled out a form online to try to correct an error only to receive some kind of form letter? How many times have you tried to call a company, medical provider or utility trying to reach a human being so you can actually explain the particulars of your situation and instead have to navigate through menus and speak to a computer program?
There are benefits, of course, to having an automated response system in place for large companies that deal with seemingly countless customer issues. Long wait times on the phone are just as rage-inducing, and writing out individual responses to each email would take up quite a bit of time for each employee.
But there has to be a middle ground, some kind of compromise between bespoke responses and automated responses that appear to have been created and let loose without any human review.
We recently passed around the newsroom an article from Motherboard, Vice’s tech-focused news section, about Airbnb’s use of a third-party vendor to do criminal background checks on both guests and hosts and how the system has kicked out quite a number of people with minor infractions long in their past with little chance of success in appealing these decisions.
Each of the guests and hosts the reporter spoke to had positive reviews from other guests and hosts and no indications they caused any problems for anyone.
One guest was kicked out for two misdemeanors in 2013 for not having her dog registered or on a leash. A “Superhost” was banned with several reservations on the books for a public intoxication charge and a driving while intoxicated charge from 10 years prior — the result of a bad interaction with medication he was on — and a missing taillight.
Both of these users had tried to reach out to Airbnb to learn more about why they were banned and received automated responses telling them to reach out to the vendor performing the background checks. After learning the details, they started the appeals process to go over the nuances of their situations, but they received automated responses that said the background checks were found to be accurate and the decision to ban them was final.
In each case, Airbnb only reversed the bans after Vice reached out to the company.
From the article: “Airbnb told Motherboard that when a report’s accuracy is not in question, only the decision on which it is based, people can appeal directly to Airbnb, But the people who spoke with Motherboard for this story said that appealing to Airbnb seemed to do little to help their cases. It was apparently only after Airbnb learned that these cases would be covered by Motherboard that it was moved to further investigate.”
That seems to contradict the message the guest with the dog-related misdemeanors received upon her appeal, stating that Airbnb had given her case and details “careful consideration.”
Vice’s story does a nice job outlining all the dangers and unintended consequences of using a third-party vendor to scour guests’ and hosts’ backgrounds for criminal offenses, so I’m not going to delve into that one — unless, of course, hotels start running background checks on guests.
My focus here is how these particular users’ cases could have been resolved had someone stepped in and taken a little more time reviewing their appeals. Clearly a woman who in 2013 didn’t properly register her dog or have it on a leash — definitely things you should do as a dog owner, but I digress — no other major or minor offenses and positive reviews isn’t going to cause problems for a host.
The hotel industry, like many others, is looking at ways to automate different operations to increase efficiency, reduce costs and better focus the time and energy spent by employees on more important tasks. We’ve already seen some of this in guest-facing roles with form letters as pre-arrival emails, chatbots and automated phone services.
It's difficult to argue against the effect automation would have on jobs given the current labor environment, but the issue of customer service remains and likely will until artificial intelligence advances enough to apply reason and critical thought like a person, in which case we might have a whole other issue to deal with.
Automation can help us deal with doing lots of little tasks at once when they would otherwise take a long time handling them individually. That creates the risk, however, of forgetting that not every customer issue is the same. Sure, there may be a lot of people appealing their Airbnb bans, and who knows how many are legitimate, but there are clearly people whose accounts were incorrectly banned and ran into people who relied too much on automated background checks and responses.
It required putting a media spotlight on these issues to get them resolved. Who knows how many guests and hosts remained banned because they’re stuck in the appeals process and can’t figure out how to talk to a live person to fix it?
I wonder whether these guests and hosts who had their bans reversed will return to Airbnb given how they were treated. You should wonder that as well as you explore automation in guest-facing services. I’ve heard at numerous conferences that hospitality is a business of people serving people, not robots serving people. I hope that extends beyond just the hotels themselves.
You can reach me at bwroten@hotelnewsnow.com or @HNN_Bryan.
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