Importance of Customer Service in Hospitality Industry Essay

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1. Introduction

Airbnb is the world’s largest lodging-sharing service platform, which started in August 2008. Airbnb, which pays the owner for the rent of the room and brokers it, is a system that takes away the commission. Officially, the person who lent the room at Airbnb is called the host and the person who enters is called the guest. The host rents all the space that a person can afford, such as his room, house, and villa, to the guest. There are many conflicts between hosts and guests due to the system of transactions between people who have not met each other. Host’s unpleasant behavior (e.g. last-minute cancellation, discrimination, sexual violence, prostitution, theft, etc) has led to increasing complaints from guests and decreasing reservations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the problems and conflicts between hosts and guests that have occurred so far using management control and to investigate how these events have been solved in Airbnb management and customer service and how to fix them in the future.

This article focuses on the case of the guest who was damaged by the host and the Airbnb customer service, therefore the case where the guest damaged the host is not included. The management problems are divided into three categories. First, the events that are happening between the host and the guest and the solution for this, Second, review the problems and solutions of Airbnb customer service, Third, review of the solution plan of the host, guest, and customer service through the management control function called Balanced Scorecards.

2. Analysis of Management Problem

2.1 Trustworthiness

Airbnb is one of the world’s sharing economies and is a peer-to-peer (P2P) business model, therefore without hosts and guests, Airbnb does not exist.

The mission and vision of Airbnb is ‘the unique experience of staying in a local’s home’. Hosts use Airbnb to get personal social interactions with other guests, and guests are looking for Airbnb rather than hotels for various reasons, such as different experiences in a foreign country, living in a different lodging, and budget prices. However, the time for hosts to rent rooms and houses to meet those who like to travel has passed. Now, the hosts’ lodging business for income was started within Airbnb. As a result, many hosts who want to pursue profits have no careful review and knowledge of Airbnb’s specific role and do not know what to provide the guests with services, which results in expectations and distrust of the guests. As the most representative example of Airbnb, it is common to cancel reservations on the day or a day before the trip (last-minute cancellation). This may be an overbooking due to receiving a lot of accommodation reservations, and sometimes the host cancels the accommodation due to personal circumstances or reasons of the host. But if the accommodations are instantly removed from the guest, the travel plan will be ruined from the beginning, especially the guests’ overseas trips.

Failure to believe that promised services will be provided occurs when the host acts dishonestly or deceives the guest. These hosts’ unpleasant behaviors are linked to the guests’ Airbnb and the distrust of hosts. Airbnb needs to recognize the importance of sufficient communication between the two as an effective approach before travel to eliminate the suspicions of guests, thus promoting trust from the host. The growth of Airbnb can build trust between host and guest and minimize uncertainty through customers’ desire for active social interaction with the host.

Management uses measurement tools to determine whether the organizational goals are being met or to compare data to measure results. A manager can use several controls to influence the organization to reduce distrust between guests and hosts and complaints from guests. There are Feedforward control, Concurrent control, and Feedback control. Feedback control is not a reasonable way to resolve the complaints of the guest, so it is excluded from the three controls. Feedforward control involves reaffirming and preventing problems before they occur; managers can regulate employees in advance for effective work. To reduce complaints that may arise from guests, Airbnb’s management must regularly inspect and test the best-skilled staff properly and manage them to resolve the various complaints of the guests. Concurrent control is the task of identifying and preventing employees’ problems. Therefore, all employee activities are checked in real-time to provide the best service to guests and hosts using Airbnb as the standard of service management. Managers monitor employees’ work activities and see if their actions and services were provided to their customers correctly. Employees are evaluated by providing services to customers through concurrent control.

2.2 Customer service

While active interaction and communication between hosts and guests are important, customer service that reviews and modifies this relationship should play a key role in Airbnb. The majority of complaints are negative customer service experiences: Airbnb, which is to be mediated in the middle of a problem between the host and the guest, is not helping. There is no way to protest by phone, so you have to contact me by e-mail. The reply usually comes a day later. Most of the answers are ‘I’m sorry, but we can not help.’ After experiencing service failures, guests rely on Airbnb to protect themselves, but due to Airbnb’s inappropriate response and lack of cooperation, they have caused confusion and awareness.

The low level of occupational spirit of the customer service workers leads to insufficient interaction and response to the customer. Airbnb needs to improve its ability to perform customer service workers using frequent internal control and remuneration and benefits, and also to change the important management system that affects individual motivation. As a result, customer service will be able to show the guest the willingness to share information and act honestly and ethically.

Internal control is a system that makes it efficient and effective to achieve the company’s goal through motivation due to the self-reflection of individuals or members of the organization. In addition, successful internal control improves accountability and individual behavior among the members of the organization to stabilize the operation and function of the company. The manager must provide clear guidelines and reasonable assurances to minimize the risk and greatly improve the expectations of achieving the goal. Managers should also be constantly motivated to remind customers of their work behavior and self-practice.

The remuneration strategy is designed for the members of the organization to improve the success and productivity of strategic goals. It motivates employees to achieve high performance through remuneration and encourages the company to take the right action actively in the company. Therefore, it will be possible to solve complaints from guests as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Quality control processes are essential for customer service operations and interconnect customer satisfaction and company sales growth. If the customer does not have a proper solution to the complaint about the service provided, it can cause negative feelings and evaluations of the customer. Airbnb should provide high-quality customer service in general and provide expectations for information accuracy, respect, and courtesy to improve customer satisfaction. If the customer service does not meet the customer’s expectations, the customer will use another accommodation website. Therefore, it is necessary to actively support employees to evaluate their performance and improve their skills. Negative complaints from customers spread rapidly through various social media and can prevent the inflow of potential guests, so managers need steady supervision of quality control.

2.3 Balanced Scorecards

Balanced Score Card is a tool for managing performance, a structured tool for managers to measure the results of employees’ performance, customer satisfaction, or effective service provision. To use the balanced scorecard effectively, there should be a measurement standard that can be measured. For example, customer satisfaction can be measured by measuring the number of good evaluations in the total number of customer evaluations, the number of sales of services, or the number of newly registered members, and the performance of employees can be measured by using the Key Performance Indicator (KPI).

Airbnb should judge customer satisfaction as the best value and set the measurement standard for it. Customer satisfaction correlates with increasing company profits, and economic income for small changes in satisfaction is enormous. If word of mouth spreads out due to customer satisfaction, it has a significant effect on revenue. One of the most important factors is proper and steady interaction with customers. It is not a proper response to customer complaints, but a change in goal for customer satisfaction.

3. Conclusion

Airbnb is one of the fastest growing companies in the world through the peer-to-peer system in the long-term form of a professional hotel. Airbnb initially focused on guests and hosts, but now it is focusing on new research. Complaints have been increasing worldwide from the basic factors (guests) that have the most important impact on Airbnb. Guests were dissatisfied with personal experiences from unconventional hosts, and the behavior in resolving complaints caused distrust of trust due to poor customer service from Airbnb. This proves that Airbnb’s value for guests has declined and that its ability to customer service to resolve complaints is not sufficient.

Control systems are systems that collect and use information to evaluate performance related to human, financial, and physical performance in consideration of existing strategies and goals. However, current Airbnb customer service does not properly control communication or interaction with guests. This means that Airbnb’s executives are losing control of customer service workers. Remuneration strategy and quality control should be used to improve the attitude of customer service workers by providing respect and trust to customers, and customer satisfaction should be determined as the best value and measured regularly through a balanced scorecard.

4. Recommendations

Airbnb executives should regularly review and test their employees’ capabilities and manage them to resolve various complaints from customers. (by using feedforward control)
Airbnb managers should monitor employees’ work activities and regularly check the service and attitude that employees have provided to customers. (by using concurrent control)
Managers should provide clear guidelines to customer service workers to improve expectations for achieving their goals. (by using Internal control)
Managers should constantly motivate employees to remind them of their work behavior and self-practice for their customers
Airbnb should provide high-quality customer service and provide accurate information, respect, and courtesy to improve customer satisfaction (by using a quality control process)
Airbnb executives should motivate them to achieve high performance through remuneration and benefits and encourage them to act actively and properly (by using The remuneration strategy)
Managers need to consistently evaluate employees’ performance and actively support them to improve their skills and abilities. (by using a Quality control process)
Customer satisfaction has a powerful impact on business profits. Airbnb executives should judge customer satisfaction as the best value and set standards for measuring results. In addition, it encourages the goal of steady interaction with customers. (by using Balanced Scorecards)

5. Reference List

Ljiljana, Z.K & Jurica, G. (2014). Evaluation of shared digital economy adoption: Case of Airbnb. IEEE. 10.1109/MIPRO.2014.6859816
Sara, D (Dec 2017). Peer-to-Peer Accommodation Networks: Pushing the boundaries. Goodfellow Publishers, 284, 10.23912/9781911396512-3454
Qui, M.Y (2018). Perceiving Airbnb as sharing economy: Guests’ expectations of Airbnb. Newcastle, NSW: Newcastle Business School, The University of Newcastle
Voon Chin, P (2017). Perceiving Airbnb as sharing economy: The issue of trust in using Airbnb, 22(17), pp.2051-2055, 10.1080/13683500.2018.1440539
Guttentag, D (Nov 2019). Progress on Airbnb: a literature review, 10(4), pp.814-844, 10.1108/JHTT-08-2018-0075
Sthapit, E & Bjork, P (July 2019). Sources of distrust: Airbnb guests’ perspectives, 31, pp.245-253, 10.1016/j.tmp.2019.05.009
John R.S (2016). Management, 6th Asia-Pacific Edition. Melbourne: Wiley

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