Gallery: Airbnb Invents a Call Center That Isn't Hell to Work At
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Airbnb is opening its first standalone customer experience center in the United States in Portland, Oregon (they have one in Dublin, Ireland).
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Rather than design a typical call center—Rows and rows of gray cubicles, everyone donning headsets, sitting at their beige desks for hours on end—Airbnb's internal design team created an office based on behavioral research.
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Aaron Harvey and Rachael Yu spent a month observing the CX team in their temporary work space, holding group brainstorms, and conducting one-on-one interviews.
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They noticed behavior ticks, like how CX staffers tend to work in fluid pairs to solve difficult problems.
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The result is an office that uses landing desks, so each employee has a spot to gravitate towards, and a variety of seats and nooks, for easy mobility.
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Even for adults, landing desks help ward off a feeling of walking into a high school cafeteria.
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Rather than hire a third party designer, a team of 50 CXers designed their own conference room. This room, the SS Clementine, is one of them.
