Applying the Principles of Customer Support to Guest Support

My monitor blinks on, allowing me to see the space I’m in, only for a second, and then back in the dark.

Cole is downstairs in the closet turned meeting room working to get WhatsApp connected for these new users in Dubai. 

Punn has just called it for the night—the end of another 15-hour day. The hours, the screen time, and the things upon things upon things never seem to phase him. I sometimes forget he’s younger than me.

My monitor blinks back on: 12:41 am. 

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Part of my responsibility is SEO, growing our organic search traffic so that we can leverage it into a recurring inbound channel.  Much of SEO involves content and much of content involves blog writing. 

Back in the spring, when we were still in the W24 batch, I did a lot of blog writing. I wouldn’t call it writing, though. When you’re trying to rank for a certain high-volume, low-difficulty, long-tailed keyword, the extent to which your writing is your writing is limited. It’s like following a cupcake recipe on a Betty Crocker box and calling it cooking. But hey—my blog on Airbnb Host Review Templates brings in 2,000 visitors to our site each day, so who knows?

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I’ve come to the opinion that effort put into something will be felt by the person experiencing it. 

I’m also of the opinion that the most personal is the most creative. If what you create expresses what you experience, it can’t help but be impactful.

Monitor blinks back on: 1:19 am.

I check my phone and see a good night message from Ava, sent a few hours ago. 

It’s time for bed. I’d like to return to this idea—the most personal, the most creative—because this thing we are building, HostAI, is that.

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Alarm goes off at 6:50 am. 

It’s tomorrow already? Fuck. My first onboard is in 30 minutes so if I snooze for another 10—eh 15—I’ll have enough time to shower and get to my desk downstairs.

—Okay I gotta get up. Maybe they canceled. I respond to a good morning text and check my email. They didn’t cancel and the three onboards following it didn’t cancel either. 

Just another day.

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Back to what I want to talk about. The most personal, the most creative.

A problem is only a problem worth solving when it’s personal. Building HostAI into a product that is getting teams to switch off Intercom, Zendesk, Trengo, Salesforce, and Front didn’t happen on its own. It came from our own experience scaling customer support. 

There was a point earlier in the year when support was our biggest problem. Tickets piled up in multiple inboxes. Customers sent us emails, texts, WhatsApp messages, and would even call us at random hours. There were days when we only did support, doing everything we could to make our users happy. We wrote support docs and made videos, but some users preferred chat. And to top it off, our tech stack didn’t connect in the way we needed it to. 

The epiphany happened when we realized that the things we were drowning in were almost identical to the pain points property managers were talking to us about on calls. Guest messaging on multiple channels, guidebooks that never get opened, and a fragmented tech stack. 

Looking at these overlapping lines of frustration, we asked ourselves: what if we removed the notion that our users are different than us? 

What if we went zoomed out and built a solution to the problems we were facing but made it flexible enough to solve our users’ problems too?

What if we applied the principles of customer support to guest support?

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Today we use HostAI as our own customer support inbox and our user base continues to grow. I feel confident in saying that there is a strong signal we are building something important. 

It’s sometimes easy to forget how far we’ve come, but I have no doubt this progress came from making our product personal. 

If what you create expresses what you experience, it can’t help but be impactful.

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I check my monitor and it’s 3:50 pm. 

No meetings for the rest of the day and our support inbox is cleared. I now get to work. 

I swipe through Spotify and land on a playlist. 

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I look up again and it’s 5:19 pm.

Time suddenly slows down and my heart gets heavy. The moment has come on strong. Today was hectic. Tomorrow will be a shit storm. But right now it’s early evening, and the office is showered with a golden light. 

Cole, Punn, and Prize are next to me, deep in their own monitors. I lean back in the silence and golden light, only for a second, and get back to work.