Company Context
StayNest is a global vacation rental marketplace with 25M annual guest bookings across 40 countries. The company competes on reliable guest experience, but support costs have risen faster than bookings over the last 12 months.
Problem
Guest support handles issues across booking, check-in, cancellations, refunds, and safety incidents through chat, phone, and email. Leadership believes the operation is inefficient, but there is no shared view on whether the root cause is poor product UX, fragmented internal tools, bad routing, or policy complexity.
Current data shows:
- Cost per guest support contact increased from $4.80 to $6.10 in 9 months
- 38% of contacts are repeat contacts within 7 days
- First-contact resolution is 54%
- Median time to resolution is 19 hours for non-urgent cases
- 27% of tickets are manually transferred at least once
- Top contact reasons are check-in issues (22%), refund status (18%), and cancellation confusion (14%)
The VP of Product asks you to identify where the biggest inefficiencies are and recommend what product changes to prioritize first.
Deliverables
- Define how you would identify inefficiencies across the guest support journey.
- Segment the problem by user type, issue type, and support channel to find the highest-impact opportunities.
- Recommend the top product or workflow improvements you would prioritize for an MVP.
- Define success metrics and how you would validate that your changes reduce inefficiency without hurting guest satisfaction.
- Explain key trade-offs you would make between automation, speed, quality, and operational cost.
Constraints
- You have one PM, one designer, and one engineering squad for a 10-week MVP.
- You cannot increase support headcount this quarter.
- Policy changes requiring legal review will take longer than the MVP window.
- Safety and fraud-related cases must continue to route to human agents.
