
Creating a great customer experience is the highest priority at Airbnb and something that we’ve made a big part of our culture. One thing that’s really helped is a storyboard we created that depicts the different steps someone goes through from the time she first hears about Airbnb to the time she leaves post-visit feedback. We have 15 pictures that cover the guest journey and 15 more that show the journey for the host.
创造良好的客户体验是 Airbnb 的首要任务,也是我们文化的重要组成部分。 真正有帮助的是我们创建的一个故事板,它描述了一个人从第一次听到 Airbnb 到访问后留下反馈的不同阶段。 我们有15张照片,涵盖了客人的旅程,还有15张照片展示了主人的旅程。
We always thought about our website and the steps someone goes through to book, but what the storyboard made clear is that we were missing a big part of the picture—the offline experience—that’s an even more meaningful part of using Airbnb than booking a property. We realized by looking at the storyboard that there are a lot of important moments where we weren’t doing anything.
我们总是想着自己的网站和人们预订房间的步骤,但是故事板清楚地表明,我们错过了很大一部分内容ーー离线体验ーー这是使用 Airbnb 比预订房产更有意义的一部分。 通过看故事板,我们意识到有很多重要的时刻我们什么也没做。
The storyboard was a galvanizing event in the company. We all now know what "frames" of the customer experience we are working to better serve. Everyone from customer service to our executive team gets shown the storyboard when they first join and its integral to how we make product and organizational decisions. Whenever there’s a question about what should be a priority, we ask ourselves which frame will this product or idea serve. It's a litmus test for all the possible opportunities and a focusing mechanism for the company.
故事板是该公司的一个令人振奋的事件。 我们现在都知道什么是我们正在努力更好地服务的客户体验的“框架”。 从客户服务到我们的执行团队,每个人在第一次加入时都会看到故事板,它是我们如何制定产品和组织决策不可或缺的一部分。 每当有关于什么应该优先考虑的问题时,我们都会问自己,这个产品或想法将服务于哪个框架。 这是对所有可能机会的试金石,也是公司的聚焦机制。

A frame from Airbnb's storyboard: A host receives a reservation request.
一个来自 Airbnb 故事板的框架: 一个主人接收到一个预订请求。
My cofounder, Brian, came up with the idea over the holidays in 2011. He was reading a biography of Walt Disney and was inspired by the lengths Disney went through in order to make Snow White. It was the first time anyone had ever tried to make a feature-length animated movie and, to make the task more manageable for his animators, Disney created storyboards that showed the pivotal moments in the movie.
我的联合创始人布莱恩在2011年的节日里想出了这个主意。 他当时正在读一本沃尔特 · 迪斯尼的传记,灵感来自于迪斯尼为了拍摄《白雪公主》所付出的努力。 这是有史以来第一次有人试图制作一部长篇动画电影,为了让他的动画师更容易完成这项任务,迪斯尼制作了故事板,显示电影中的关键时刻。
We started brainstorming what our storyboard would look like. We started with a list of many, many moments, grouped like ones together and refined them down into a concise set. If you have too many moments on your storyboard, it’s worthless. Fifteen seemed comprehensive yet manageable.
我们开始头脑风暴我们的故事板会是什么样子。 我们从一个列表开始,列出了许许多多的时刻,像一些时刻一样组合在一起,然后将它们精炼成一个简洁的集合。 如果你的故事板上有太多的时刻,它就毫无价值。 其中十五项看起来既全面又易于管理。
We hired an animator from Pixar to design the storyboard for us. Inside Airbnb, we call it “Snow White.” We wrote every idea we had ever talked about on sticky notes and arranged them under the most appropriate frame. What we found was that some frames were overrepresented. A lot of our ideas historically had been focused on our website, which makes sense because in the past, we might have just taken screenshots showing the steps people go through on the website and stuck those on the wall. There was less coverage of things that had to do with the offline frames.
我们从皮克斯聘请了一位动画师来为我们设计故事板。 在 Airbnb 内部,我们称之为“白雪公主” 我们把所有我们谈论过的想法都写在便利贴上,并把它们放在最合适的框架下。 我们发现有些帧被过度表示了。 我们的很多想法历来都集中在我们的网站上,这是有道理的,因为在过去,我们可能只是截屏显示人们在网站上的步骤,并把这些步骤贴在墙上。 与离线帧有关的内容覆盖较少。
We then had a roadmap for figuring out what a customer expects in each of those situations, what we were doing to meet those expectations and where we had an opportunity to create a “wow” moment. We noticed a lot of gaps. It became our number one priority to fix those areas where we weren’t doing what the customer expected of us.
然后我们就有了一个路线图,弄清楚客户在每种情况下的期望是什么,我们正在做什么来满足这些期望,以及我们在哪里有机会创造一个“哇”的时刻。 我们注意到了很多差距。 我们的首要任务就是解决那些我们没有做到客户期望我们做的事情的领域。
One product we created as a result is our Neighborhood Guides. Our goal was to provide context on what different neighborhoods are like so someone can decide whether one is right or wrong for him. When someone is booking a hotel it’s usually in a touristy part of town and he can’t really go wrong. But Airbnbs are everywhere and that can create a lot of questions: What’s the neighborhood like? Are there things around that I’m going to enjoy? The Neighborhood Guides, which we now have for every single neighborhood in a set of cities, are very visual and make people feel more comfortable in that frame of the Airbnb experience.
我们创造的一个产品就是我们的邻里指南。 我们的目标是提供不同社区是什么样子的背景,这样人们就可以决定一个人是对还是错。 当有人预订酒店时,通常是在城镇的旅游区,他不可能真的出错。 但是 airbnb 无处不在,这就产生了很多问题: 社区是什么样的? 周围有我喜欢的东西吗? 我们现在为一系列城市中的每一个社区都提供了邻里指南,它非常直观,让人们在 Airbnb 的体验框架中感觉更舒适。
The storyboard also helped us realize that we had teams focused on a dozen or more different product areas that were fairly narrowly defined, like search. Our search team thought about its goal in terms of search conversion. They did great work within that narrow scope, but we realized that there were a lot of things that were un-owned that were slightly outside the scope of search, but still related to the discovery process. There were opportunities there that we weren’t capturing.
故事板还帮助我们意识到,我们的团队专注于十几个或更多不同的产品领域,这些产品领域的定义相当狭窄,比如搜索。 我们的搜索团队考虑了搜索转化率的目标。 他们在这个狭窄的范围内做了伟大的工作,但是我们意识到有很多东西是不属于搜索范围的,但是仍然与发现过程有关。 那里有我们没有抓住的机会。
Going forward, our teams are aligning as a frame or group of frames. So if you have an idea or there’s a problem, it's very easy to map that to a frame and identify the owner. Most importantly, it's obvious to everyone what the impact is on customers.
展望未来,我们的团队正在作为一个框架或一组框架调整。 因此,如果你有一个想法或有一个问题,这是非常容易地映射到一个框架,并确定所有者。 最重要的是,对每个人来说,这对消费者的影响是显而易见的。