Manager, Customer Service

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.

The difference you will make:

We are seeking a dedicated and enthusiastic candidate to provide exceptional Customer Service management to the Airbnb community as a Manager.The ideal candidate is hospitable, analytical, and committed to delivering the highest standards of service through coaching and upleveling their team. This is a full-time position based in Japan.

The Manager supports one or more internal CS services. The Manager is an operational leadership role that requires substantial experience in customer service and team management. Managers oversee teams of approximately 10-15 ambassadors and should have the ability to guide and uplevel their ambassadors, demonstrating top-level customer service skills. Strong organizational skills and the ability to balance real-time and planned work are also required. They should also be adaptable and responsive in our fast paced environment, sometimes under pressure, while remaining flexible, proactive, resourceful, efficient and demonstrating a high level of professionalism and confidentiality.      

A Typical Day:

• Oversee a strong operational environment for your teams and ensure high quality support for the community from your team

• Manage the team execution of complex, sensitive, and/or urgent issues that might pose a significant risk to our brand or community, including acting as the highest escalation point for case consults and high level escalations from other stakeholders

• Meet with your direct reports regularly to review their work and provide high quality, behavior-based coaching; must be able to create a performance development strategy/plan for your service(s).

• Provide best practices guidelines to your team on how to handle cases and situations, and ensure that ways of working are documented and followed.

• Ensure that the team is consistently staffed appropriately and that staff complete onboarding and ongoing trainings.

• For cases that involve internal stakeholders, guide ambassadors to take proper action to case closure and in rare cases, support with in-the-weeds case handling

• Collaborate with Capacity Planning & WFP on setting minimum headcount, ensuring adequate coverage, contingency planning impacts of changes, and advocating for staffing needs vs. volume/work

• Drive performance at the ambassador, team, and service level

• Ensure individual team members are held accountable to performance goals in a fair and equitable manner by setting clear expectations, following-up individually, and coaching team members positively to develop and improve their skills in a tailored way

• Manage both ambassador  and team performance, including identifying trends in performance, providing corrective actions and positive overall feedback, and writing year end reviews and improvement plans

• Ability to set and articulate the vision and focus for the quarter; deliver that vision and focus through all hands-type meetings

• Share input and recommendations about service target setting.

• Provide oversight on the overall service performance and contribute to reporting on trends and providing a holistic picture of the service to the Delivery Director

• Build and nurture an engaged and diverse team

• Own and manage end-to-end people strategy and operations within your ambassador team to foster a high performing and sustainable team environment. This includes hiring, driving onboarding, talent development, and people engagement/wellness/morale

• Enable team and individual professional success through supporting and challenging your team to meet and exceed expectations with clear goals/expectations, feedback, one-on-ones, and coaching

• Support team in professional development within team by finding and creating development opportunities and leveraging company-wide resources to regularly drive development within your team.

• Keep up with day-to-day management duties such as time off approvals, team and one-on-one meetings, and managing Talent-related issues

• Maintain a culture of openness, transparency and accountability allowing our teams to deliver their best work while being themselves 

• Demonstrate strong leadership on important issues including Diversity & Belonging, Allyship, Ethics, Compliance and maintaining high standards of service to the company

• Support strategic initiatives within Delivery and your service as needed

• Lead the team toward the successful execution of company or other strategic changes or goals within your service by cascading updates and changes, communicating new requirements, and providing feedback

• Support, as needed, internal Delivery performance & operations improvement projects, in collaboration with the Delivery Excellence team and cross-functional partners

• Think critically and constantly evaluate our procedures. Collect feedback from the team to identify opportunities to improve performance and better optimize processes for the team, service, and global community

Your expertise:

• 8+ years of progressive experience in a customer service or an operations role, with 5 years in a role directly managing staff & the employee lifecycle
• Demonstrable experience in driving improved performance of teams as a line manager
• Experience in the deployment of resources to manage real-time crisis situations, including managing high severity/sensitivity cases and decision-making authority for losses
• Experience in data analysis and reporting to identify performance trends, as well as  developing and implementing performance management standards
• Experience translating big picture goals and strategy into implementable and concrete actions for your teams, including setting operational or functional targets or performance goals 
• Ability to work weekend days, holidays, and on-call required

Your skills and competencies:

• Fluent in English and Japanese
• Exceptional leadership and team management skills to manage a team of professionals - comfort with conflict, giving and receiving feedback, and handling employee/Talent issues
• Strong communication skills to collaborate with different stakeholders and manage sensitive cases, while remaining calm and poised under pressure
• Organized and resourceful; able to juggle and multi-task, with an attention to detail and follow through even in ambiguous situations
• In-depth understanding of customer service operations and processes; able to translate that to your team
• Strategic thinking and problem-solving abilities to evaluate procedures and identify opportunities for improvement
• Ability to cascade with context and lead your team through changes
• Exceptional coaching skills, you have high EQ and know how to tailor your feedback & communication style to meet the needs of your coachee or mentee
• Cultural competency and a strong commitment to fostering diversity and inclusion within the team
• Proficiency in various data analysis and reporting tools to track performance trends (tableau, SQL, Excel, Google Sheets, etc.)

Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging:

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: reasonableaccommodations@airbnb.com. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process. 

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application

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