Turno

Chris Rule serves as Vice President of Customer Experience at Turno, where he leads customer success and operations teams. He focuses on anticipating customer needs, scaling service delivery and strengthening customer relationships across the organization. Rule drives initiatives that improve customer engagement while supporting sustainable business growth.

Building Customer Experience on a Foundation of Hospitality

My career began in hospitality at 18. After earning a degree in hospitality management, I spent the next decade working in hotels and restaurants where every interaction demanded attention to detail, thoughtful communication and the ability to anticipate guest needs before concerns surfaced. Those experiences shaped my understanding of service and continue to guide every customer experience decision I make today.

Moving into technology at OpenTable made me realize how software could strengthen relationships rather than replace them. During nearly a decade there, I helped build the customer success and account management functions while learning that technology works best when it supports great service. Another six years spent scaling post-sale operations reinforced the same mindset across different industries and stages of growth.

Joining Turno naturally brought those experiences together. Short-term rentals depend on exceptional service for both hosts and cleaners, making hospitality central to every interaction. The hospitality perspective continues to shape how we structure, scale, and measure customer experience across the business.

Using Technology to Create More Human Connections

Many organizations frame operational efficiency and customer experience as a trade-off. I don’t see them that way. Investing in efficiency gives our team more time to strengthen customer relationships rather than simply handle more work.

AI has become a key enabler of that approach. We introduced AI into our support workflow to handle clear-cut, repeatable questions already covered by our knowledge resources. Before expanding its role, we reviewed every AI-managed interaction for three months to ensure responses consistently met our standards.

Today, AI handles the initial response for 100 percent of customer interactions entering our support organization and independently resolves more than 40 percent without human involvement. Customer satisfaction scores continue to approach those of our support specialists, showing that automation can improve the customer experience when implemented thoughtfully.

The time and cost savings generated by automation don’t go toward running a leaner team. They allow us to reach customers before problems escalate, shifting our focus from reactive support to proactive engagement. Resolving issues quickly still matters, but it should be the starting point rather than the destination.

Predicting Customer Needs Before Problems Escalate

Most organizations excel at responding when customers complain. The greater retention risk comes from the customers who quietly disengage. By the time they cancel, it’s usually too late. Our proactive retention engine uses behavioral data to identify those early signs and trigger meaningful outreach before the customer has mentally checked out.

One important insight we gained was that hosts who gave cleaners a low review were about 50 percent less likely to complete another project on our platform. Instead of waiting for another complaint, the system automatically triggers personalized outreach within 20 minutes. Each conversation acknowledges what happened, introduces the Turno Cleaner Guarantee and opens a genuine dialogue instead of sending a generic follow-up.

Those outreach efforts generate a 65 percent response rate and most of those who engage go on to complete another project with us. Building on those results, we’re expanding the model to identify additional behavioral signals—including usage frequency, feature adoption and booking trends—so we can intervene even earlier.

“ Service is the foundation. Technology and systems are the amplifiers. ”

Our customer experience strategy also reflects the needs of a two-sided marketplace. We give equal attention to hosts and cleaners, with engagement remaining roughly 50/50 between both groups month over month. Dedicated resources and specialized playbooks help create a stronger ecosystem than marketplace models that naturally favor one side.

Short-term rental turnovers are inherently human. Cleaners become unavailable, guests check out late and hosts manage properties across multiple markets. Built around those realities, the Turno Cleaner Guarantee draws on more than 126,000 vetted marketplace cleaners worldwide to secure same-day replacements for cancellations or no-shows whenever possible.

Creating Scalable Systems without Losing the Human Element

Delivering consistent service across markets requires strong operational foundations. Turno’s international expansion has largely been pull-driven. Hosts who have a great experience in one market naturally bring the platform to properties in others, and local cleaner networks quickly follow. That’s a strong signal that the product travels well.

Supporting that momentum requires accessibility at every level. Our platform supports most North American and European languages, works across 25-plus currencies and offers web and mobile applications in nine languages. Its built-in translation helps hosts and cleaners communicate across language barriers, while 24/7 live support provides dependable assistance regardless of location or operating hours.

Long-term success depends on building systems before expanding teams. Hiring more people can solve short-term capacity challenges, but hiring isn’t scaling. Sustainable growth depends on building the data, automation, playbooks and escalation frameworks that give teams the right context before every customer interaction.

Turning Experience into Actionable Insights

Sharing those lessons inspired my LinkedIn Tangible AI Series, which documents real workflows, measurable outcomes and the testing behind each deployment. Much of today’s AI conversation remains abstract, leaving leaders inspired but unsure how to apply it. The series focuses on practical examples showing how AI is built, validated and integrated into daily operations.

My first post covered how we rebuilt our support workflow, in which AI initiates 100 percent of customer interactions and resolves roughly 40 percent without human involvement, while customer satisfaction scores continue to approach those of our human team. Another focused on cleaner application reviews. We trained the AI agent on our internal documentation, tested it against historical workloads before deployment, refined it over several weeks and then rolled it into production, reducing application processing times from 72 to 48 hours.

Publishing these experiences has shown that practitioners value specific guidance grounded in measurable outcomes. The advantage isn’t the idea itself, but the execution, the team culture behind it and the discipline to test carefully before scaling.

As customer experience evolves, automation will continue removing routine work so people can focus on the conversations and decisions that require judgment. Service remains the foundation. Technology and systems are the amplifiers. The organizations that win won’t be those with the most automation, but the ones that use it to become more human.