How Airbnb leveraged customer feedback to build a $80billion+ business

Any and all businesses can help themself grow if they focus on their customer’s word. In this blog we’ll see how Airbnb, the market leader in online marketplace for lodging and tourism experiences achieved their current position through consistently working on what their customers had to say about their platform.

Airbnb was born in 2007 with two hosts welcoming three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 1.5 billion guests arrivals in almost every country across the globe. For a business like Airbnb, there are two points of focus when we talk about platform customers. The first category could be the 'hosts' on the platform that are the service providers as well which lend their properties and other services to cater to the people who are looking for having an experience through Airbnb.The other category of customers are the people who use Airbnb as a booking platform to plan their experience.

Now both of these categories play an important part in the business and its important for Airbnb to understand the perspective from all angles to make the right decisions. If you made a quick google search about what makes Airbnb this successful, one of the key factors you'll find is strategic emphasis on design thinking and user experience. Although its an obvious guess to make, that a business thats selling customer experience would need to provide a “good customer experience”, its not that simple to understand what a good experience means to a customer without learning it from the customer themselves.

Airbnb since their early days, emphasised getting words from their customers on whats working for them and what needs rethinking. A person booking an experience with one of the hosts on Airbnb can let the host or the platform know what they liked and what they would prefer differently and similarly a host can contribute to the design thinking of the platform by giving feedback on what can be improved so they can leverage the platform better to bring in more customers and provide them with better experiences that in turn drives business growth.