Websites collect information about the people who use them, and the people who end up not using them. If you’ve even visited the website of Airbnb, the company has used your data to improve its offerings or its site in some way.

In a profile of the company’s interim lead for data science, Elena Grewal, the Los Angeles Times Wire Service explained a little bit about how the site uses the data that it gathers from customers based on their behavior.

“We distill the voice of our customers and use that voice to help inform our products,” she told the Times. Note that the customers are making their needs known through their behavior, not through actual complaints to the company.

People using the site or conducting searches and thinking about booking a reservation may not actually realize what they want, or what they aren’t finding on the site. Grewal uses the example of data showing that people are searching for lodgings in a certain city, and not finding any.

She also used data analysis in hiring new members for the data team, determining at which point in the application process women would be screened out, and changing the instructions for that point in the process to make the company’s expectations clearer.

For Airbnb exec, data is ‘a very powerful lens’ [LA Times Wire Service]

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