As a vacation rental manager, you do all you can to assure your guests have a positive experience. You provide clean and high-quality accommodations, make check-in and check-out smooth and stress-free, and offer ways for guests to reach you if they have questions or concerns during their stay.
Instead of being a way to boost the customer’s experience, the helpline often becomes a headache — for the guest, for your staff, and for yourself. Support calls that come in for routine issues time and time again not only cost real dollars now but potential future revenue.
Calculating Dollars and Cents
One of our customers, Savannah Luxury Rentals, estimates that support calls last over 10 minutes on average. Figuring out the problem takes up most of that time. But not all of it. “We manage a lot of properties. Most of the time the guests don’t know their address or the specific brand and model of an amenity they need help with,” says Sam Anderson, Owner/Managing Partner of Savannah Luxury Rentals. That extra time adds up.
When the guests can’t explain what’s wrong, they get frustrated, and when you can’t understand what’s wrong, you can’t fix it and you get frustrated. It’s a lose-lose situation.
Sam estimates that each customer service call costs his company around $25. You can figure out your costs too, which can be helpful for seeing how much money you’re wasting on service calls. Take the full hourly rate (be sure to include benefits and vacation) of the person or people providing customer service. Divide that rate by six (based on 10-minute call average per guest call; 60 minutes divided by 10). Take that number and multiply by the number of calls you estimate you receive per guest stay. Make sure to include everything. For example, sometimes the call will require an in-person visit which costs significantly more.
Once you know how much each of those calls is costing your company, you can then figure out how many calls you get on average each day. Then take that daily average and multiply it over a year to see how much these calls cost each year—we think you’ll be shocked!
Minimizing Guest Frustrations
It happens all the time — a guest calls you because they can’t operate the television to watch their favorite show or they’re having trouble getting the hot tub jets to work. Minor issues like this come up often with guests and those precious minutes add up.
The cost is more than just the immediate dollars and cents. Sometimes guests are embarrassed about having to call for help too. Most guests would prefer to just send a text or an email or find the information they need right in the home. Because they’re already frustrated they have to call in the first place, many of these guests will get even more exasperated trying to follow instructions over the phone. These frustrations can lead to lower ratings and negative comments, which leads to fewer potential bookings and lower revenue. Those guests might not rebook either, losing you even more future revenue.
Avoiding Employee Burnout
Finding a solution for unnecessary customer service calls not only benefits your guests, it also benefits your staff. You or your customer service reps likely field a lot of calls every day and at times, it can become overwhelming. When this happens day in and day out, your employees get discouraged which leads to exhaustion which leads to burnout.
And that’s during normal times. When different states opened up during the COVID-19 pandemic, many rental properties experienced huge booking surges never seen before. From May through June 2020, Airbnb listings in the U.S. had more nights booked than the same period in 2019. More bookings equal more help calls equals more stress on your reps.
It’s not just phone calls stressing out employees either. VRM Intel found that 33 percent of Americans prefer texting to any other communication methods and texting is the most used form of messaging for Americans under the age of fifty. Those same studies found that eight trillion texts are sent each year with an average response time of fewer than three minutes. Talk about pressure—your customer service reps responding to customer service texts have high expectations to meet! And the need to respond quickly means you or your team are bouncing between tasks, hurting your productivity.
Making Your Time and Energy Efficient
Your time is precious too. The more time you can spend on efforts that move your business forward instead of dealing with routine help calls, the better. Your time should be spent marketing to increase bookings, managing your listings, engaging with potential guests, communicating with owners, directing maintenance and cleaning, analyzing the business, and delighting your guests with great service (to enhance the stay) instead of dealing with problems. This is another cost to consider.
Turn Frustrating into Fruitful
Sam Anderson from Savannah Luxury Rentals said that nearly half of his guests call because they can’t figure out how to use the jacuzzi. He shared how frustrating it was for the guest and his team to try and work by explaining how the hot tub works over the phone. It’s difficult for the person providing support because they can’t see what the guest is doing and many times the guest can’t follow the instructions. Conversations often go like this:
“Push the button with the arrow.”
“I did push that button, but nothing is happening.”
“Are you sure you pushed the button with the arrow?”
It doesn’t have to be this way though!
Enter the GuestView Guide
Fortunately, a solution exists! GuestView Guide is an engaging digital concierge that you mount on the wall inside of your vacation rental unit. It helps reduce guest calls by providing helpful information that’s available on-demand 24/7 to make it easy for guests to find and use appliances and amenities in and around the property. The flexible platform lets you upload videos, documents, and photos so you can communicate information in the most effective way. GuestView Guide also lets you curate and share restaurants and activities recommendations so you can ensure your guests have a delightful and uniquely local stay.
To learn more about GuestView Guide visit our website.
