'The Operators': Experts from Airbnb and Carta on building and managing your company's customer support

Tim Hsia & Neil Devani Contributor

Tim Hsia is the CEO of Media Mobilize and a Venture Partner at Digital Garage. Neil Devani is an angel investor and venture capitalist focused on companies solving hard problems.

The show:

The Operators brings experts with experience at companies like Airbnb, Brex, Docsend, Facebook, Google, Lyft, Carta, Slack, Uber, WeWork, etc. to share insider tips on how to break into fields like marketing and product management. They also share best practices for entrepreneurs on how to hire and manage experts from domains outside their own.

In this episode:

In Episode 5, we’re talking about customer service. Neil interviews Andy Yasutake, Airbnb’s Global Product Director of Customer and Community Support Platform Products, and Jared Thomas, Carta’s Head of Enterprise Relationship Management.

Neil Devani: Hello and welcome to the Operators, where we talk to entrepreneurs and executives from leading technology companies like Google, Facebook, Airbnb, and Carta about how to break into a new field, how to build a successful career, and how to hire and manage talent beyond your own expertise. We skip over the lofty prognostications from venture capitalists and storytime with founders to dig into the nuts and bolts of how it all works here from the people doing the real day to day work, the people who make it all happen, the people who know what it really takes. The Operators.

Today we are talking to two experts in customer service, one with hundreds of millions of individual paying customers and the other being the industry standard for managing equity investments. I’m your host, Neil Devani, and we’re coming to you today from Digital Garage in downtown San Francisco.

Joining me is Jared Thomas, head of Enterprise Relationship Management at Carta, a $1 billion-plus company after a recent round of financing led by Andreessen Horowitz. Carta, formerly known as eShares, is the leading provider of cap table management and valuation software with thousands of customers and almost a million individual shareholders as users. Customers and users trust Carta to manage their investments, a very serious responsibility requiring trust and security.

Also joining us is Andy Yasutake, the Global Product Director of Customer and Community Support Platform Products at Airbnb, one of the most valuable private tech startups today. Airbnb has millions of hosts who are trusting strangers to come into their homes and hundreds of millions of guests who are trusting someone to provide a roof over their head. The number of cases and types of cases that Andy and his team have to think about and manage boggle the mind. Jared and Andy, thank you for joining us.

Andy Yasutake: Thank you for having us.

Jared Thomas: Thank you so much.

Devani: To start, Andy, can you share your background and how you got to where you are today?

Yasutake: Sure. I’m originally from southern California. I was born and raised in LA. I went to USC for undergrad, University of Southern California, and I actually studied psychology and information systems.

Late-90s, the dot com was going on, I’d always been kind of interested in tech, went into management consulting at interstate consulting that became Accenture, and was in consulting for over 10 years and always worked on large systems of implementation of technology projects around customers. So customer service, sales transformation, anything around CRM, as kind of a foundation, but it was always very technical, but really loved the psychology part of it, the people side.

And so I was always on multiple consulting projects and one of the consulting projects with actually here in the Bay Area. I eventually moved up here 10 years ago and joined eBay, and at eBay I was the director of product for the customer services organization as well. And was there for five years.

I left for Linkedin, so another rocket ship that was growing and was the senior director of technology solutions and operations where I had all the kind of business enabling functions as well as the technology, and now have been at Airbnb for about four months. So I’m back to kind of my, my biggest passion around products and in the customer support and community experience and customer service world.

Devani: Very cool. And can you share just for the listeners who maybe aren’t as familiar with what a team like this looks like, who are the different people that work with you both in terms of who’s reporting to you, who you’re reporting to, people around you, things like that.

Yasutake: So as the director of support products and community supports, I’m part of the larger community support organization and community support at Airbnb encompasses really, it’s called a platform organization or platform team. Not from a technology standpoint alone, but really the whole customer experience and customer service organization support Airbnb’s guests and hosts. So if you think about a guest and host going on a trip to book a listing, they may have issues encountering with the host place that they’re staying.

And so there’s volumes of customer service type issues, user issues that they would encounter and contact Airbnb’s customer service and support. So our team is actually the team that builds all the products and tools and the technologies to help the 10,000+ agents in supporting all these users issues. It helps actually enable the guest to have the best end-to-end trip experience.

So the types of groups that I work and collaborate within our organization are a series of customer service and support business enabling functions that include things to execute projects on project and program management in our service evolution team. Service excellence includes things like training and quality. How do you actually scale all these agents that are actually supporting guests and hosts in a consistent way, as well as the traditional customer service operations team.

So there’s a head of global customer operations and divided into different regions. So I collaborate personally with my product teams, I have product managers, we have product designers, engineers, content research, content writers, and content on research and strategy. So we create everything to make sure we’re solving for the guests and hosts across the whole life cycle and journey. And we report into the CEO of Airbnb who reports into the executive team.

Devani: Very cool, very cool. I have been both a host and a guest and never had a problem. So thank you for keeping things smooth.

(Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)

Yasutake: If you ever do you know who to reach out to.

Devani: That’s right. I’ll just contact you directly! Jared, if you could tell us more about how you got to Carta and a little bit about your team as well, that’d be great.

Thomas: Definitely. Yeah. So my experience will be a little bit different from Andy’s. We’re obviously at a different points in our career, but it’ll be fun to hear the different stories that we have, especially because it sounds like you’ve joined some more mature rocket ships and really helped take them to scale, and I think my story is a little bit the opposite, starting at a company really small and helping it grow.

I’m from Seattle originally, I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs and really grew up with a business that I interned at. It was called Serengeti Law, that ended up getting bought by Thompson Reuters. That was a legal e-billing and matter management startup, so it was a software used by attorneys and in-house counsels. It is actually, in a lot of ways, very similar to what we do at Carta.

I went to Claremont Mckenna College in Southern California and I spent my summers interning at that same company and then post-college really wanted to focus on building, so I had a philosophy undergrad, liberal arts degree. I was focusing on communication and learning how to write in college, and post-college I really knew that I wanted to build something. I didn’t know what that looked like and I was pretty green and I knew I wanted to learn and Silicon Valley and going into tech really made a lot of sense at that point.

So I got pretty lucky and did the job search, did the couchsurfing thing, ended up here in San Francisco and got lucky and got a job on the customer support team at Carta as one of our first customer support people. We were about 40 people at the time and since then I’ve been really focused on building and one of the few people to be customer-facing the entirety of my journey.

So over the past three and a half years I’ve done and helped build teams on customer support, onboarding and implementations, customer success, relationship management, with really the resounding theme being helping to take teams from start to finish, starting from scratch and being a customer advocate all along the way. And then the really cool part about that is that I’ve been able to really grow with the company. So I started here in San Francisco at our headquarters and as the company’s grown and we’ve grown into new places, I’ve moved to Seattle to help start that office and done the same thing now in New York City.

Devani: Very cool. Following up on that, one question I love to ask people is, what are the entry-level jobs like and what’s a good way to get into that?

So if you’re talking to someone who’s maybe still in college or thinking about switching careers and they’re looking at Carta or they’re looking at Airbnb and they’re thinking, I want to do something on the customer support, customer service side, what kind of jobs are there at the entry-level and what do you really look for in hiring those people?

Thomas: So that’s a great question and it’s perfect because that was me. I really had no idea what I was looking for or what direction to go in. I was really fortunate to have a number of mentors that helped me, not only understand what company might make sense and everybody talks about choosing the next unicorn, but more importantly what type of boss to look for, what type of role openings there are and what you might like.

The way I thought about my career and the advice that I would give to others is to find a place where you’re going to have, almost independent of title, the opportunity to learn and a boss that’s going to give you that opportunity. So no matter how great your company is, your direct manager is going to be really important.

At a company like Carta, though, in terms of entry-level, there are a couple of other episodes you have focused on like sales or products or business, biz ops for customer support and customer success. Those roles at Carta are going to look like customer success, they’re going to be analyst level and really though it’s going to be a focus on customer support, right?

These are the people answering the phones, answering chats, and answering emails, and that’s kind of how I cut my teeth is going through the customer support trajectory, and then making my way up through either implementation, customer success, or our relationship management function.

Devani: Got it. How do you think about that at Airbnb? What do you guys look for in entry-level folks? What’s a good hallmark of someone who’s going to be successful in that role?

Yasutake: So when you think about the community and Airbnb, it’s not called customer support, it’s called community support because our community is the guests and hosts and how they’re leveraging our platform. And it’s unique because it’s not like it’s a mom and pop shop you’re going to, it’s a platform that we’re offering, you know, connection of a guest having a need, whether it’s a home to stay in and experience they want to go on, transportation in the future, this marketplace business.

And so what we want to do is to make sure that the guests and hosts feel like they can go on their journey. They’re not coming for customer support, they’re not trying to find out what their item is if they’re on Amazon, they actually want to get on with their journey with their family or etc. So you want individuals that actually have a caring passion for helping someone, right?

So the way we think about the community is how do we actually in the future, build a community where we can create exceptional service and exceptional support. You can’t do that if the people don’t actually care about and can put themselves in the shoes of the individual to help support them. So it starts there, right?

Traditional customer service support is helping the guests or hosts get on with their journey. And if you can actually understand where they’re coming from, look into, into the tools and the systems to actually see what’s going on, what do they book, what did the hosts say was going to be? If you’re the host, what did the guests, what did they commit to in staying. If there’s an understanding what the issue is from their perspective, you know, empathize with them and then actually try to solve their issue, right?

Don’t pass it on because you have an operational metric that you’re being measured on. It’s actually about what is their user issue, how can I best help them get on with their journey with their family and friends. And so really it’s this kind of mindset of helping and serving, as well as thinking about how can I actually help them get on with their journey.

Image via Getty Images / alashi

Devani: Do you look for candidates who maybe are more empathetic, to use that word, or extroverted? Is that an important skill or since things are more text and email-based, is that not as important?

Yasutake: So it comes through. So you would think that in a messaging channel or it wasn’t voice that “Oh, you don’t have to be empathetic. They can’t really take that.” But actually people, any way you communicate on the phone or over text people understand if you actually are just saying it because you’re following a script or if you actually care about their issue.

So we’ve actually seen you can be introverted or extroverted. You can have all different types of personality backgrounds, but the key is understanding what the problem is and trying to help them solve it in the best way available. If you’re a more natural introvert and you’re not great at talking to the phone, you can work on other channels that you don’t have to actually be live in the moment.

So we really can cater to all different types of personalities and kind of backgrounds, but ultimately it’s going back to that core point and how do we actually create an exceptional support experience and ultimately help any guests or hosts feel like they belong right on their journey.

Devani: Do you guys, either one of you, measure these sorts of things with your customer support, customer service folks in terms of how they’re emoting and managing relationships with customers?

Thomas: That’s a great question. Funny enough you should say that Andy, that’s really similar to what we encounter at Carta. We’d like to think of ourselves as a little bit different and the problems that we have to solve, we’re a legal technology, financial technology company that’s focused on kind of doing a lot of the things that everybody has to do but nobody really wants to do. Because of that, really the focus that we have is on delivering results.

A lot of what we do is a checkbox. It’s that experience that you were referring to at Airbnb. So really understanding that core problem and then being able to find people who have the ability to operate in ambiguity, I’d say that’s the skill that we look to define the most. It’s a little bit hard to measure, but when we interview people, the best way that we measure this through our interview process, and we have people that are specifically looking for individuals who can operate in an ambiguous environment and then take the next step and make sure not only to answer the question they’re being asked, but to understand what someone’s trying to accomplish. I’d say probably the best way we do a followup once someone actually works at our company is through like a C-SAT or NPS program.

Devani: Got it.

Yasutake: So similarly, we have an NPS program as well and you know, pretty extensive quality program, right? So when you think about, you know, the peer.

Devani: Can you define NPS?

Yasutake: NPS is a net promoter score and so it’s an industry kind of standard metric. In the customer service world, there’s kind of two kind of core metrics that aren’t like operational C-SAT, customer satisfaction, or NPS, net promoter score. And this basically is on a scale of one to ten, how likely are you to refer to your friend or family that service? So if it’s anywhere from zero to six, it is negative. If it’s seven or eight, it’s neutral, and nine or 10, it’s positive.

And so with those interactions you can actually see was that experience whether it’s a product experience or their support experience, how likely you refer, right, so you can actually see is there ways to improve that. Did we actually not make them feel like we understood their problem? And so it’s a pretty standard industry metric that we, that we look at our broad level.

So when we actually look at our specialists, our agents experience with the guests and hosts, you know, we have a quality team that actually listens to calls and actually looks and reads the ticket in the case to understand are they actually being empathetic, are they trying to understand the issue? When we look at the survey results of the NPS scores, is there a correlation between the actions taken on that interaction and solving the guest or host issue? Or is it something else because they didn’t actually answer the question.

They just were going through the process. And trying to get off the phone as fast as possible, which is not what we want.

Devani: Right.

Yasutake: Right, so it’s using measurement to ultimately change the behavior and improve the experience, right? Because you’re going to have all kinds of levels of experience when you talk about a number of agents that are scale.

Devani: Yeah. That’s a great feedback mechanism, for you as a company and for the product, but then also for the individual to know if they’re doing a good job in that way. Are there other ways or other advice you would give to someone who’s maybe already started a career at an entry-level and they’re trying to figure out how do I move up and advance.

Given that you guys have had success in your careers, what are some of the hidden things maybe are not so obvious things about how to accelerate your growth?

Yasutake: So I can start. I think one of the things that I’ve learned early in my career, and it maybe comes back to my original kind of psychology background, I wasn’t a traditional technologist. But one of the things is that I also had a mentor, and I’ve had mentors over the years and I’ve tried to give back by being a mentor, is that relationships absolutely matter, right? Sometimes people are like, “oh, it’s just who you know that’s going to get you. Or oh they’re well connected.”

But relationships that you build in the workplace, personally, and professionally, actually help. They help you progress through your career, there’s people that are more senior that you may feel intimidated to, just talk to them. Most people, they love to share their kind of knowledge and experiences, and so early in my career, I would ask like, “Hey, how did you actually figure this out? Or how’d you know if this was the right role? How did you take that quote-unquote intelligent risk to go and jump into a role that you were uncomfortable with?”

And a lot of times it was being bold and just asking, and people would give you very sound advice and could help you get along with your journey. So that’s one thing is relationships matter and be curious, keep asking questions and continue to learn.

You talked about learning and you need to do this constantly because if you don’t, and if you’re the smartest person in the room and you’re not learning. You actually don’t want to be the smartest person in the room. You want to be with people that are more senior, that have more experience, that can share their perspective so you can continually grow and then suddenly you’re continuing to progress in your career too, and you’re giving back, which is exciting.

Image via Getty Images / Rawpixel

Devani: Yeah. That’s great. What do you think, Jared?

Thomas: Yeah, when I think about what Carta has given me, being really my primary career opportunity and the vast majority of my learning, the main piece has been getting exposure early. I think it’s pretty similar to relationships, whether it be with clients or internally. One of the great things about working at a fast-growing startup or a growth stage company is that you’re going to get reps way before you would at a larger company.

So in terms of learning, the best way that I usually quantify that for people is by talking about how let’s say I were to go work for an accounting firm outside of school or go into consulting. Oftentimes I wouldn’t be able to talk to clients right away, right?

You’re going to go through a learning and training program, you’re going to go through a structured environment where they’re going to have the next steps, and then they have a clear career trajectory, and a leveling program. It was really the opposite experience for me at Carta, where day one, you’re talking to customers, and there’s a little bit of sink or swim, and it’s quite scary at times.

However, treating the opportunity to talk to a customer as a privilege rather than something that you are having to do cause you’re on the low end of the totem pole really helps you embrace that learning experience. And that has really led to exponential growth in my career personally. Probably the predominant learning function is being able to talk to the CEO of a fast-growing company, being able to talk to board members, investors. It is one of the unique things about Carta in that our main users are and tend to be some of the more important people at a company.

But getting that exposure and building those relationships, it really does come around a couple of years later, and you now have this amazing support network who really do care about you and want to see you grow. Both internally with the bosses, the people that have really helped me grow and then as well externally with our client base.

Devani: Very cool. I have been on the phone with people at Carta at odd times and been overseas as well, being on the phone with someone at Carta was always a great experience.

Thomas: That’s awesome to hear. The team still killer. They really are. The people that shine are the ones that they understand that the way we grow as a business, doing this stuff that no one else wants to do, is by getting them to the finish line.

There’s nothing more rewarding than that first experience of like turning around a customer who had a negative NPS, and you give them a call, and you get on the phone, and you get them to the finish line. That customer will forever be in your corner after you do that.

Devani: Yeah. Well, you got me. So that’s great to hear. Are there things that you wish you knew when you started or you wish other people knew? This is an opportunity for you to say, here’s something everyone should know that maybe they don’t.

Thomas: So, and I apologize if I take this too far away from the customer success and services avenue, but I really wished that I knew the importance of referrals when I was first getting started in the startup space.

I must’ve applied to 65, 70 companies, and I was just filling out job applications online, and no response. I had this idea that every company, especially the early-stage ones that I wanted to apply to, Series A, B, I had this idea that they had their full hiring process together. Now, being at a point where I’ve helped probably hire 75 to 100 people, being on different interview panels, or hiring directly for my teams, you realize just how much room there is for improvement at a company of our size.

So I wish I knew the importance of the referral network. It ended up working out okay, and I got referred for the job that I ended up having, but it would’ve saved a lot more focus. We have a really strong community, I think, in the tech sphere, and people are looking. Like I’ve got hundreds of jobs open at Carta right now, and I think it’s probably the same at Airbnb.

And so on one side you have a group clamoring to hire smart, excited young people. And then on the other side you’ve got the young people that are clamoring for those opportunities and jobs. And getting that little foot in the door to get your resume looked at is probably the biggest thing that I wish I knew.

Devani: That’s helpful. I’m gonna tell our listeners, if you’re looking to work at Carta, find Jared on LinkedIn, and hit him up.

Thomas: I’m right there. I’m a big Carta referrer.

Yasutake: For me, I think early in my career, kind of looking back, I wish people would have told me sooner that it’s okay to fail fast. It’s okay to actually be this growth mindset, continual learner. It’s one of those things you go like, “I’m now in a corporate job”, or “I’m in a real job.” Like, “I can’t mess up because I need to have this job to pay my bills.” And in reality, the people that are taking risks, like I was talking about earlier, intelligent risks, and fail faster, they actually learn and grow even more.

And leaders look at that and say, hey, are you actually taking risks? Or you just kind of go with the status quo. And early in my career I remember realizing that, “Hey, I just want to do things right. I don’t want to mess up.” That kind of mentality of not messing up is actually preventative for you growing. But saying, “you know what, I can go, I’m in a time box. I’m not going to go and disastrously fail. I’m going to go set some goals that I can actually try to achieve.”

And they may be small, but there may be something that I can improve on and learn. You’ll get more confidence, and if you’re on this continuous growth mindset and you’re not trying to be the smartest person in the room, you’re always going to be humble and tell yourself, “Hey, I can do better and I can improve.” And over time you start realizing that people think you’re now an expert in a certain area and you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t even know.” It’s because you just continue to push yourself to want to read, want to talk.

Don’t worry about titles. If people have the time and you actually are interested in learning from them, most people are actually willing to take time and share their learnings. So probably the two things are: don’t be afraid to fail, but fail fast in the learning and continually iterate on that. And two, don’t worry about titles they’re all people. People actually care about where you are in your career, and if they can give you advice that even helps you a little bit, they feel really good about it.

Image via Getty Images / erhui1979

Devani: Great. Let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about founders and entrepreneurs. So people who are starting their first company. Maybe you’re a full-stack developer, or you’re on the business development sales side of it. You have a small team; two, three, four people, something like that. When should you start thinking about hiring someone to be dedicated on customer support or customer success? How should you think about that?

Yasutake: So I’ve worked at companies that were a little bit more mature, kind of Airbnbs and LinkedIn’s after a few years. But there’s always the founder stories that talk about like, “Hey, the original founder for Airbnb, Joe, one of the cofounders, was customer service.” He was customer support at LinkedIn. It wasn’t, it wasn’t Reid Hoffman, but it was another guy that’s one of the VPs of product. He was customer service and support.

And it wasn’t until they realized that it couldn’t be one person just checking the email and the number of issues were actually increasing because there was product adoption, they said, “We should have hired the right people at the right time sooner so we could actually improve.” And it becomes a virtuous cycle where you’re supporting the users that are actually using the product. So they actually want to come back. Especially in the early days.

Whether it’s a product or a service, you don’t want people to use it once and stop using it because they had a bad support experience. So I would say that you don’t need to be investing as significantly early if you’re an early founder. But as it starts getting adoption, starts uptaking, make sure it’s not a necessary evil. To your earlier point, it’s something that is a voice of the customer and feedback into making the product better. If you’re actually selling them services, how do we make this better so you can sell more, right? So it’s an incredibly great opportunity for a feedback loop early on.

And as it scales, it even enhances the brand. And so a company like Airbnb, which has a big focus and culture on our brand, having investment from our leaders from the beginning on, this can’t be something that’s the third or fourth priority in the company. This has to be near the top because this is all about experiences. It’s about your trip, it’s about the homes you’re staying in.

And if you don’t feel safe, if your property isn’t taken care of, you’re not going to come back. And so, that mindset of, “this isn’t a necessary evil, but this is actually a part of our strategy” needs to be a key part early on and can scale as the business grows.

Devani: Great. Jared, on your end, you’ve started at a much smaller company that’s now grown. How did you guys think about starting a company and, from what you know, how do they think about hiring the first hire?

Thomas: Yeah. My first boss was our first customer support hire. And the way I think about it is pretty similar to the way you do and, and it’s, um, it’s, it is that privilege to talk to customers. You are getting that feedback loop. You’re getting the information from your customers. And so even early on I would say try to hold off.

If I were a founder, I would hold off as long as possible to hire support people. And the reason being is, early stage, you have a dire need to learn as much as possible about what your customers are going through. I would say right about now, Carta just about 675 people, and I’ve been at Carta for about three and a half years. Right about now is where I think we’re going through a transition where everybody isn’t doing support.

We have this ethos at the company, and that’s, “Always be helpful.” And it really is one of those few things that was up on the wall and, and really permeated our culture. And so I have been doing customer support with most of the members of our company; that includes engineers, that includes product people, operations, our executive team. I spend a lot of time with the partnerships channels.

The commonality between those different groups and the people who rise up and who have stuck and really excelled at our company is they have that customer-focus mindset. They treated that opportunity to work with a customer and solve a problem like the privilege that it is.

Devani: I think that’s really important. It sounds like there’s a very clear theme here, in terms of working very closely with the customer to solve their needs so they’re happy, but also taking that information and having that loop that is really helpful. And I can see founders really valuing that early on, where they don’t know where exactly they’re going and having that voice of the customer can help define the direction.

Thomas: Yeah. Your best customers, they become your partners. Our biggest evangelists are our customers. And I remember I used Airbnb because someone showed me Airbnb for the first time and signed me up. It’s the same thing with Carta. Your best salespeople are, are the people that are selling for you, and those are your customers.

Devani: Let’s ask like a more fun question here. You both have very sophisticated teams and operations. I’m sure you use a lot of different software. What are some products that you really like, either from large incumbent companies or some new startups, that you’d like to share with the audience?

Yasutake: So most recently, and I know there’s a lot of press around it, the FaceApp thing around aging. That’s been something that’s actually been a big hit with my kids, looking at me at different ages. So I like to use consumer products that are fun, that are out there, that are probably risky, but they’re fun.

And on a more kind of practical basis, coming from LinkedIn in the past, I actually leveraged LinkedIn. I’m very consistently around it, consuming and reading news. I love Spotify, I use Spotify for playlists and the different preferences.

And obviously the more mainstream, Netflix, Amazon Prime and Video and things like that. Actually, my latest one is Youtube TV. I recently cut the cord, and I love it. It’s amazing. So most of the consumer products, I’m an early adopter.

Devani: I actually meant in a work context, but now I’m gonna check out your Instagram for a second for some FaceApps and good content there. What about you, Jared? What do you think about customer support tools, things like that?

Thomas: Carta is really interesting. We’ve probably used most software out there at this point, and we’ve tended to migrate quickly. I think some of that helps, but also we’ve definitely created our own road bumps as we’ve grown and scaled with our different teams.

So I would say Salesforce is by far the biggest one. We’ve gone the full circle from having Salesforce, to trying to build our own, to trying alternatives, to back to Salesforce. In addition to that, I’d say in terms of customer advocacy, we spend a lot of time just using the basic Gmail Suite.

We’re not yet sophisticated enough to be on like a Gainsight or one of those tools. We’re really laying down the fundamental operational structure, especially considering our customer success group was recently founded and we were just standing it up for the first time. So, as we chart our customer journey and our customer life cycle, I do know that we will grow and get more sophisticated in those tools that we use.

But for now it’s an emphasis on like communication. I think our biggest tool is documentation in Salesforce and then picking up the phone. Give the customer a call. Whenever something’s going on, pick up the phone.

Devani: Yea, get that human to human connection. Andy, if you want to share any tools, I’ll let you, and then we’ll wrap it up with Jared sharing his favorite consumer apps.

Yasutake: So in the customer service technology world, it’s been very fascinating over the last few years. It’s been kind of consumerization of the enterprise, where people are specialists or agents coming into call centers or looking at their first customer support job, and they’re going into places that have 1980s technology – green screens, or a new web browser technology – when they’re at home on their mobile apps and using consumer products.

So you’ve seen in the last probably one to three years, a shift of these enterprise products becoming more like the consumer products, where the users who are using it actually resonate with it, and it actually can support the customer in different way, versus like, “That’s my grandpa’s computer that they used to use or my dad’s.” So this kind of mentality has been shifting, with everything from the Salesforce.coms to the large omnichannel platforms. I talked about this with my team; if you go to conferences and if you don’t hear the words AI and ML related to some conversational chatbot, you don’t win bingo, right? It’s a buzzword bingo.

So every new technology out there has some form of that, but it’s not a new technology, right? I call it the intelligent automation across the whole stack. There’s RPA, robotic process automation, that helps our agents become more efficient by augmenting the experience, you can use AI to actually predict issues and route it to the right on appropriate teams. There’s a lot of technologies out there that we’re using currently at Airbnb and evaluating that isn’t just the standard enterprise product, but it’s actually leveraging some more newer technologies while making it more mainstream and part of the flow to actually improve the experience.

To do what I always say, make our agents and reps look like geniuses. They don’t actually have to be, but if they have the data and they have the flows in their tools and it makes them be more efficient, it not only helps the business, but ultimately helps our guests and hosts get along with their journey.

Devani: Do you guys roll a lot of your own products then internally?

Yasutake: We do. So, I mean, I call it sometimes the classic Silicon Valley challenge, is where everybody wants to just build everything. And so we’re looking at a longer-term strategy and saying, how do we buy and build? How do we, you know, buy things that are more commoditized, build things that are unique to our business and integrate them in a way so it’s seamless.

So you’re not logging onto Airbnb and it looks like you’re logging into Salesforce or Oracle or some other system. You’re logging into Airbnb. You have a mobile app. You have desktop. You have whatever you do, but it’s actually there to enhance your journey, not to go through another vendor software.

Devani: Great. All right, Jared, we’ll wrap it up with your favorite consumer apps. Am I going to find you on FaceApp?

Thomas: Consumer apps? I’m not a big app guy, I try to stay off my phone as much as I can when I’m not at work. I’d be remiss if I didn’t plug the Carta app. It’s wonderful. The other two I probably use, I’ve become a Superhuman guy. I live in email, so I’ve joined the hype train. And then in addition to that, I’m a big advocate of TripActions. It’s made my life a lot easier. I’m traveling a ton for work and I really like the app experience.

Devani: Both great companies. I’m a fan of both. Well, Andy, Jared, thank you so much for sharing your insights and for joining us today. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.