Thia is actually quite annoying, because the one time I've used their customer services they were really good. I needed to cancel half of a reservation (booked for 2 nights, needed to leave early), and the hotel staff said they couldn't do that as I'd booked through a third party. I called Booking.com and they made it happen. Hopefully whoever they outsource to can continue the good work.
This may be one of the reasons for the uproar. The CS employees far outnumber the rest of the company, and the in-house customer service was one of the moats B.com had against the competition. To have them suddenly transferred to a third party is shocking.
It’s hard to imagine the same level of service can be provided by call centers tending to multiple brands/products at the same time.
I’ve worked there and I can confirm that the customer service was very impressive and able to deal with particularly gnarly problems, in so many languages and cultures. It was a very large part of the company. It was under-utilised to understand customers’ concerns. There was some effort to include them: dedicated product org, include impact on CS metrics in A/B test results, but it often felt like the ugly duckling.
I was thinking or re-investing since the pandemic looked like slowing down and travel stock migth take over but that move tells me unequivocally not to bother.
Multi language support was a particularly impressive. I don’t know if it was in-house or not. Few times family members, who aren’t fluent in English, needed help with their reservations. I was expecting that I had to reach out on their behalf, but their were able to resolve it efficiently on their own.
> Hopefully whoever they outsource to can continue the good work.
Run. Run far away and as fast as you can from this kind of move when you see it.
Outsourcing moves like this are a signal that the leadership views operations as a cost center of script-following monkeys. It won't blow them up, but it will consign a part of their organization to mediocrity, open to competitive attack.
Contrast that with the organizations I've seen who unlock the real value of operations: partners on the front line who feel the trends in their aggregate customer interactions, who are continuously, intricately involved in instrumenting operational data gathering based upon their gut feeling of those trends to drive rationalized product improvements. Software and data analytics makes it all possible, at a scale and granularity never before possible.
I’ve had the same experience in the past. I travel to Japan a lot and outside the big cities many hotels there just don’t have anyone who speaks English, which obviously makes direct interaction with the hotel difficult. Booking.com customer service was always excellent. Never took too long to get connected to a real person, and that person was usually able to solve my problem or at least find a good compromise.
If their service declines I hope a new service gets created that replicates what they do, but I worry that if someone was to build a company like this nowadays they’d just not hire phone support staff.
>Hopefully whoever they outsource to can continue the good work.
I've never seen this go well. My most recent experience is one of many where "improvements" were terrible for me as a customer.
Amerigas, a national propane company, did the same thing the year before last. When I needed someone, I'd call the local office and talk to someone who knew the area and the business and would get whatever question or issue resolved almost immediately. When they "improved" customer service by firing all of these local people and consolidated them into a (not offshore, at least) customer service center, it was a total nightmare.
We were in the middle of a backyard renovation that required burying the propane line for our grill and stove. I called the local office and scheduled everything a couple months in advance. When the appointment time came, I received a notification that it was going to be delayed by a week, which would also hold up my project at a cost of $1000/day to pay for an idle crew and their equipment. Unfortunately, between the time I made the appointment and the time I called to see if it could be moved back, the customer service "upgrade" happened.
Every rep was super friendly, but no one had any knowledge of the business and every call required about 40 minutes of hold time just to speak with someone, 10 minutes of conversation, and then another 40 minutes of hold time to speak with the supervisor who was more knowledgable. Even the supservisors didn't have answers and would promise to call back by the end of the day. Of course, out of the 5-6 conversations we had with that promise, exactly zero resulted in a callback. When the work was finally done, it was done without a permit, which could only be pulled by the gas company, so the project was on hold again until that was resolved.
In the end, I had to find a customer service VP on LinkedIn and send them a very polite note about the "unpermitted gas line work" done on my property. That resulted in the issue being resolved the very next day. Before the upgrade, I could have spoken directly with the local rep, who would then just speak to the local tech, and resolve things almost immediately every time.
Thia is actually quite annoying, because the one time I've used their customer services they were really good. I needed to cancel half of a reservation (booked for 2 nights, needed to leave early), and the hotel staff said they couldn't do that as I'd booked through a third party. I called Booking.com and they made it happen. Hopefully whoever they outsource to can continue the good work.