February 17, 2025 • 30 mins
How can a hotel chain with over 5,700 properties transform its tech support into a human-centered experience? In this episode, Tariq Valani, Global SVP of Support Services at Accor, reveals the innovative strategies that are reshaping the way hotel technology is delivered and supported.
Key Takeaways:
- Discover how Accor centralized its support services from eight regional desks to a single global function, enhancing efficiency and user experience across its diverse portfolio.
- Learn about the importance of understanding user personas in tech support, and how prioritizing front-line staff needs can significantly impact guest satisfaction.
- Explore actionable insights on implementing human-centric design principles in tech support, including training programs that empower agents to empathize with users and take ownership of their service interactions.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
I think all sides need to understand that anybody
can choose to change. Nothing isa given. And what keeps you
secure in that relationship isgoing forward with a common
platform and a common, let'ssay, measurement of success.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
From Hotel Tech Report, it's Hotel Tech Insider,
a show about the future ofhotels and the technology that
powers them.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Today, we speak with Tariq Falani, the global SVP of
support services at Accor. Tariqoversees Accor's entire IT
function, and his teams helpeveryone from front desk agents
to GMs who might encounter techchallenges. Tariq talks us
through a few big initiativeshe's led. He also shares shares
(00:44):
how he transformed his team'soperations by training them on
human centric design. Well,welcome to the show, Tarek.
Great to have you here. Verymuch looking forward to covering
some interesting topics withyou. To get us started, I would
love for you to introduceyourself. Tell us a bit about
(01:04):
your role and the company youwork for.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
First off, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure
to be on the show with youtoday. My name is Tariq Balani,
and I'm the global SVP ofsupport services at Accor. In
the role that I currently servein, I essentially look after
support for tech, sales,distribution, and loyalty for
Accor's portfolio across theworld, which is about 5,700
(01:29):
hotels and about 43 brands.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Have you always been in that role at Accor, or how
has your career taken to whereyou are now?
Speaker 1 (01:40):
So I actually started in Accor via the acquisition of
Move and Pick. In Move and Pick,I was serving as the head of
infrastructure, security, andoperations. And post
acquisition, I moved intoAccor's team in The Middle East.
In The Middle East, I startedoff spearheading the integration
of the two companies from aninfrastructure perspective. So
(02:01):
working with the then existingAccor teams, obviously
representing the move and pickteams, and carrying out the
integration.
And once that was done, I tookon various interim roles before
I landed into managing theIndia, Middle East, Africa,
Turkey region, and that's whereI managed about 450 of the Accor
(02:22):
hotels operationally. And fromthen is when I moved into this
current role. So it's been aspan of about five years with
Accor, post Movable Pink, andtwo in the current role that I'm
in.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Well, I know that your discipline is a little bit
different than the typical guestwe have on the podcast here. So
I would love for you to give aquick explainer on what your
support organization does? Whoare the customers or users that
they're helping? And how doesthe organization function within
Accor?
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Sure. So you're right. It is a bit different to,
you know, the normal podcast orinterviews that you have.
However, I would see thefunction that I run as a very
much supportive function of theoperations, if you will. So if
you think about any of thehotels that have issues with
(03:18):
their PCs, moving up tonetworks, etcetera, with sales
applications, with distributionapplications, or loyalty
applications.
From a functional and atechnical perspective, this is
what we look after. So we have alot of, you know, let's say,
hotels that come to us or logtickets saying, I can't do a, b,
(03:40):
and c because my computer isbroken, or you have users of
applications who need to be,let's say, retrained on how to
do certain things within theapplication, and this is where
we come in as well. So it'sactually two parts of the
operation, and we support everysingle hotel.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Are most of the systems that your team supports,
are they vendors? Or does Accorhave some proprietary tech as
well that maybe your team builtand supports? Or is it mostly
supporting third party systems?
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Very good question. So the tech support is a little
bit easier to understand becausethat is your typical desk side
support going up to servers,etcetera, and that's the typical
tech stack that we have acrossdifferent industries as well as
different brands within withinhospitality. However, when you
talk about loyalty anddistribution, that is where
(04:36):
there's a bit more of a flavorand especially with
distribution. We are currentlyusing what we call TARS. It's
essentially the Accorreservation system.
And TARS is a purpose in housebuilt reservation system that
was built quite some time ago,and it has served as well as the
(04:59):
res central reservations. And wewill now be moving to something
that is off the shelf,obviously, a bit more customized
as well, but using a partner,which is Amadeus.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
So I'm just curious, how does that work for your
team? Your team needs to be theexperts on the system and the
people that regular employeesor, you know, front desk agents
would come to you for support ortraining. How do you make sure
that your team is well trainedon a new system?
Speaker 1 (05:29):
So, essentially, you're right. My team does need
to be as good as either thefront desk users, so kind of
like power users themselves. Andthe difference I would say is
that they experience a lot ofthese questions. They experience
a lot of different scenarios,which gives them the ability to
be able to help others. But theydefinitely go through rigorous
(05:53):
training on all the platformsthat we have.
And then, of course, after that,they're writing all the how tos,
the knowledge based articles,publishing videos, and so the
knowledge keeps increasingwithin the team. So they are
definitely learning all of theseapplications, but at a much more
and it's interesting because alot of them do come from either
(06:13):
within hotels or have been therea long time.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
I know one big thing that you've worked on over the
years is humanizing the supportjourney or the support
experience. Can you tell me alittle bit about that journey to
kind of centralize the functionand make it more human?
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Sure. So Accor used to function as eight subregions,
couple of years ago, and therewas a transformation that was
put in place to have us functionas four major regions. So The
Americas, Europe and NorthAfrica, near APAC in Greater
China. Prior to this, we wereactually functioning also with
(06:55):
eight different service desks.And in a lot of the cases, if
not all, we had eight differentservice desk applications.
So with the formation of mydepartment, which happened at
the beginning of 2023, weessentially took on the
challenge to centralize all ofthese service desks into one
(07:17):
global support function. So whatwe do have today is a
centralized level one and leveltwo technical support. And to
your question about thehumanizing part, one of the
things that we did when westarted the journey was take a
step back and look at supportas, you know, a service that we
(07:38):
offer and said, okay. What arethe biggest pain points that we
have? What are the biggest painpoints that the people we are
going to serve have?
And what we then did is beforewe even started to centralize
anything, we started to byidentifying the personas that we
would be dealing with, mappingout the user journeys from
(08:00):
logging a case or an incidentall the way to the resolution.
And that kind of became thebaseline for us to build our
processes on how we actuallysupport. And so we had a a great
partnership with, a companycalled HIT Global, and they run
a program called Humanizing IT.One of the cofounders is
(08:21):
actually a coauthor of ITILfour, and she launched this
program simply because whilereviewing ITIL four, she
realized that there wasn't asingle picture of a human being
in the book. And that's when itkinda struck to say, well, hold
on a second.
We are serving people, but wedon't have people at the heart
(08:43):
of what we're doing. And this ishow the whole concept was born.
And so with HitGlobal, weactually managed to build out
our service desk or ourcentralized global service desk.
And in addition to that, we wentso I've put through over 600
agents through the humanizing ITcourse, which essentially has
(09:06):
taught them all about customerservice, personas, and putting
the user and their feelings andessentially empathizing with the
person that you're supporting inorder to understand how to act,
how to prioritize, andunderstanding the severity of
what that individual is feelingat that very moment so that you
(09:28):
can kind of, you know, servethem better and leave them with
a much better feeling than whenthey came in.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
Just rewinding a little bit to the topic of
centralizing support. So youmentioned there were eight
different teams, basically,eight different service desks.
What was the decision processwhen it came to centralizing?
Like, what did you see as thepros to centralizing cons of
keeping them separate? Becausethat's a big decision, and I
(09:57):
would imagine that framework canapply to a lot of different
things.
You know, maybe if you have ahandful of hotels, they all have
individual reservations teams.Like, what's that decision
process when you're thinking ofcombining them?
Speaker 1 (10:12):
When we analyzed the eight different service desks,
we found that some of theservice desks were actually
utilizing the same externaloutsource partner. Some of them
had internal service desks orwith a local flavor with an
outsource partner. And soeveryone was kind of doing their
(10:34):
own thing. And the reality isthat the level one of that
service worked quite well evenwhen it was split into the
eight. However, level tworesided more at a corporate
level.
And so what we had and what wasone of the biggest drivers of
centralizing was the fact thatlevel one and level two were not
(10:56):
very cohesive. And bycentralizing, what we did is we
made level one and level twointo one team. So if you can
imagine, we had eight servicedesks of level one, and we had
one central level two. We tookthe level two, combined it into
one team with the level one. Andthen all we did was with the
(11:17):
collapse of the regions ontothemselves to form bigger
regions, we just made that intoone service desk.
And what they do now is abide bythe same processes and the same
philosophy, the same vision, thesame mission. And so a user of
any of our hotels or in any ofour hotels could essentially
(11:38):
work in, I would say, a Novotelin Sao Paulo and go to a Novotel
or an Ibis or a Pullman or aMowen Pick in Sydney and have
the same support experiencetoday. So whereas in the past,
it would have been verydifferent. It would have been
very regional specific. And nowyou have that single user
(12:00):
experience, or at least if I cansay that's where we strive to
be.
It's not an overnight journey.It's not something super easy to
accomplish. We have done quite abit of work to get to where we
are today. And of course, asalways, we have more to do.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
How do you handle the trade offs between having very
standardized procedures or verystandardized operation, but also
having the flexibility toaccount for those regional
differences. You know, I canimagine those are two different
ends of the spectrum that arealways pulling you in two
directions.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Right. So I think the key to to look at here is the
fact that those processes andprocedures are built in such a
way that they can be applied todifferent applications or
different technology stacks. Thekey is not to be rigid, but the
key is to give the teams a wayto operate, which gives them the
(12:55):
comfort to understand what'snext. That can also include
things like escalation parts,you know, service level
agreements or objectives. Alsowithin the organization having
operating level agreements.
So all of this is what we wantedto achieve because you would
have two different teams, the lone or level one handing off to
(13:19):
a specialist team. But betweenthe two teams, there was never
an agreement of how quick theywould respond or serve the team
that escalated. And so there's alot to be said. I mean, even
though the applications aredifferent, but there's a lot to
be said about having thoseinternal agreements and ways of
working to kind of make things alot easier for the agents to be
(13:39):
able to provide a a superiorservice.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
I wanna get back to the customer centered, human
centered service conversation.So one thing that you mentioned
that I thought was interestingwas the idea of encouraging
agents to think of the persona,who they're working with. Can
you give me an example of what apersona might be for someone
(14:03):
that one of your agents washelping?
Speaker 1 (14:06):
Sure. So, I mean, if you look at a typical hotel, you
could have a front desk agent,you could have a finance and
accounting manager, you couldhave the general manager, you
could have somebody in sales.And the idea of understanding
these personas, and we do haveI'll just sidetrack for a second
before I answer the question,but we work currently today with
(14:29):
internal teams as well asoutsource partners. And one of
the key points is that we ensurethat regardless of what type of
team it is or because first ofall, we all consider it as one
team. And the second part is wehave to have that knowledge of
the hospitality industry.
And so the idea here is toensure even if we have outsource
(14:52):
partners who, you know, get infresh people who have never
worked in hospitality, part ofthe onboarding is to understand
the business and understandingthose personas is part of that.
And so to the question, it'sessentially saying that if you
understand what the individualdoes, it allows you to execute
(15:12):
in a much more efficient manner.And the example I always give,
which kind of makes it easy, isto say, imagine you had a ticket
or a call from a front deskagent who has a check-in line of
20 people, and they have anissue with their computer or
unable to log in to Opera. Andthen at the same time, you have
(15:34):
a ticket or a call from afinance manager who has an issue
with the formula in Excel.Understanding those two
personas, understanding thelevel of pressure that sits with
each one, understanding, youknow, at that very moment, what
is the contribution to ourbusiness, to our reputation, to
(15:55):
the customer satisfaction, whichis the ultimate goal.
Right? The guest experience andthe customer satisfaction. This
is how we then help them to workit back and say, listen. The
biggest impact on userexperience or guest experience
and customer satisfaction willbe that check-in line. And
therefore, this is your priorityto help that front office agent.
(16:17):
They may not be as seniorranking in the hotel. It doesn't
matter. Their particular job atthat particular time is what
really matters, and that's whereyou need to focus your help. I
mean, the key is that in thepast, it would have been it's
the GM. Okay.
I need to go and serve the GM.But at the same time, we're all
(16:38):
well aware that if theindividual supporting are given
the tools to understand thesepersonas, they are also in a
position to turn around to theGM and say, look. I have one of
your front office agents who'scurrently experiencing a long
line of check ins. They'reunable to work. Would you mind
if I go back to them and helpthem and then come back to you?
(17:01):
I can almost guarantee you thatevery single GM will turn around
and say, yes. Forget about me.Go and help them. Right? And so
it's it's a lot better to beable to understand the business
and the personas to be able toexplain what you're doing and
why as opposed to just, youknow, if you kinda say, oh, I'll
put you on hold or I'll get backto you when I can without that
(17:23):
explanation or showing that GMthat you understand their pain,
but this is what you're doingfor them in another way, that's
what makes it a lot easier.
And it takes one incident tolose a loyalty member. Right?
And when you look at the cost ofacquisition of a member and when
(17:44):
you look at a service that yourender and you could have
avoided losing that member,that's what makes it a little
more interesting as well. Soand, typically, this is not
something that is passed downthe ranks. You know, at a
managerial layer, this wouldsomewhat be understood, or at
the top ranks, it's even moreunderstood.
But when you get down to asupport level one agent who is
(18:07):
so far removed from thebusiness, they will never stop
to think about that kind of animpact. And so this is what we
wanted to actually achieve wasto make them more involved and
trained so that they understandthe business and the impact that
they have.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
I'm just curious if you're able to share. Is there
some component of theircompensation or performance
review or something like thatthat takes these factors into
account? Or how are theyencouraged to always keep those
things front of mind?
Speaker 1 (18:39):
When it comes to the internal teams, it formed a part
of their learning anddevelopment plan for the year.
So 2024 saw us do the 600trainings. And so the 600 are
broken down, like I said, intointernal, external, and
outsource. For the internalteams, it was part of their
(19:00):
learning and development plan.And for the external and
outsource, we also did the samething.
So we worked with a fantasticpartner called ITC Infotech out
of India. They have, I think,just a bit over 50% of my team
sits with them in Bangalore. Andthey did a fantastic job through
(19:20):
their own learning anddevelopment department to take
every single person in my teamthrough this course. And so it
wasn't even though it was acomputer based training, we
still had members of the HITGlobal Humanizing IT team come
into India as well. There was aroad show that we did in Paris,
(19:40):
in Bangalore, in Bangkok wherewe have most of the members.
So it was kind of a lot aroundcommunication, a lot around
building that momentum to keeppeople engaged to understand why
we're doing what we're doing,involving learning and
development. And after it, whatwe actually did was look at the
(20:00):
impact of these courses. Andspecifically within ITC, when we
looked at agents that hadcompleted because it was a
rolling course. So you had some,of course, that finished it the
minute we launched in, you know,I think we started in March of
twenty twenty four. And so byMay, you had a whole bunch of
(20:20):
people who had completed, andthen, of course, you had some
that completed in December.
And so you still saw that therewere batches of the team that
completed along the way. And ifyou look at the scoring customer
satisfaction for tickets theyhad taken, handling time,
etcetera, you could see thedifference from before. And
(20:42):
let's say, we measured, I thinkit was about three, four months
after completion of the course.And so there was a visible
difference for sure.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
So what metrics are you measuring to see the impact
there? Is there, like, a usersatisfaction or or issue
resolution time or somethinglike that?
Speaker 1 (21:02):
I mean, we did initially say that it is not
something that you can typicallymeasure because when you look at
customer satisfaction, right, alot of the time you will get
customer feedback when peopleare upset with the service that
you provide. You do, however,get a lot of people giving their
(21:23):
feedback when they're happy. Butwhat counts is actually the
verbal or the written feedbackthat you get. And so what we
tried to do was combine that bytaking those agents that had
completed the course, looking attheir tickets, looking at those
that gave feedback, positivefeedback in the form of a
(21:44):
customer satisfaction score. Andthen the learning and
development teams, along withthe team managers, reached out
to the users who actuallyexperienced that service and
asked them if they would bewilling to give us that
feedback.
And, essentially, we did manageto collect a lot of feedback
from the teams simply because itwas one on one, it was not
(22:07):
system generated. It wasactually somebody reaching out
to say, look, this is what wedid. This is what happened. This
is what we're expecting. Now canyou give us your experience from
before and after?
And particularly about this, youknow, incident, what did you
think? And this is where we gotthe positive response.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Just so our listeners can clearly understand what
you're talking about with ahuman centric approach. Can you
give me an example of how aninteraction might differ in the
old way of doing things versusthe new way that has a more
human centric approach?
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Well, I think we kinda touched on an example of
the GM and and, you know, thefront office agent. But it's
also about when we talk abouthuman centered design, it's
about understanding the problem,you know, brainstorming the
ideas, and then looking at thepossible solutions and then
trying them out, but also havingthe ability to iterate what you
(23:08):
do. Right? And so with regardsto the human part of it, when we
were designing the processes ofcase to incident, we actually
mapped out the different stepsthat a ticket would go through,
understood what needed to bedone in a quicker way, what
needed to be done with moreempathy, understood who is
(23:29):
sitting behind each layer ofthat ticket, and how do we get
it out the other side in a more,let's say, effective manner.
Right?
And so that's one part of it.And the other part of it is
understanding that we're notdealing with machines, we're
dealing with people. And justputting on blinders and saying,
(23:51):
well, this is my process. Ican't help you if you don't fit
into my process. That wassomething we also kind of moved
away from.
So it's all well and good tohave the processes and
procedures, but it's also aboutdesigning for the circumstance
and also empowering the agentsto be able to make decisions to
(24:13):
kind of deviate a little bitwhere they feel they need to in
order to have the right outcome.And accountability is a big one
on this. What we find in atypical service desk is that I
take a ticket, I do my bid, andif I escalate, then that's where
it ends for me because it's nowgone to level two. But what
(24:35):
we've done is we said, okay.First and foremost, whoever
takes the ticket in level one,you own that.
The ownership for the entirelife cycle is yours. And what
that means is that when theyescalate to level two, they're
still responsible to follow-up.Right? And the same way if level
(24:55):
two escalate to level three,they still have that ownership
to follow-up with level threebecause they're still gonna get
follow ups from level one. Soit's kind of having
accountability.
It's making sure that you kindof know that the person on the
other end who opened that ticketopened it for a reason. They
(25:15):
need your help. Otherwise, theywouldn't have opened a ticket.
And so it's not just aboutfollowing the process and then
ignoring things. It's aboutmaking sure you come through and
deliver.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
So one other topic I wanted to ask about. I
understand that you have somekey vendor relationships. Of
course, the system that you useor that all of your agents use
to to handle tickets and so on.Can you talk to me a bit about
your vendor relationships? Howdo you think about those
relationships as partnerships?
How do those relationships helpdrive your work forward?
Speaker 1 (25:50):
So I think the key or the biggest example I can give
you is, like I mentioned, IPC.They are one of our biggest
partners. And while we don'tprocure a system from them, you
know, we have people with them.And that makes it all the more
(26:10):
tricky because, you know, you'renot just dealing with a piece of
software. You're dealing withhuman beings.
And so that's one part. And toextend on that, ITC have kind of
come into our model, which iswhat we like to do is work as a
partner. And when we startedoff, there were a lot of
elements that were new to bothsides. And we walked in and we
(26:33):
said, okay. We're committed togetting this done.
We aligned on what the visionwas. We aligned on what success
looks like. And it was amazingto see that, you know, you come
into this partnership, and theywere willing to come to the
table, admit when they mademistakes, also come to the table
(26:55):
and tell us when we mademistakes. And, of course, both
sides were happy to acceptbecause the way the partnership
was built was that we're notcoming to the table to highlight
mistakes because we wanna goafter each other, whether it's
commercially or blame orwhatever, but it's to make each
other better. And we have donethis so many times.
(27:18):
They have literally opened theirdoors to us and said, okay.
Well, if you think we're notdoing this in the right way,
tell us. What would you like usto change? And so we have, you
know, managed serviceagreements, which hold true.
However, if we advise them tochange certain elements of their
(27:39):
managed service, they do so.
And at the same time, if thereare certain elements internally
for us that are not working,they come to us and advise us
and say, look, this particularbit that you have internally
doesn't work, and we fix that.Because at the end of the day,
it's the entire loop that wehave together. We form a big
(28:00):
part of it. They form a big partof it. But at the end, the
recipient is the hotels.
Right? And so this partnershipmodel that we have, being open
minded, and it works like thiswith a lot of the other partners
we have. So including withHitGlobal, you know, we have the
same sort of a model whereeverything is done together. A
(28:24):
very big collaboration,understanding, you know, what
are the common goals, what arethe common metrics of success.
And I think this is what hasenabled us to be successful
because we align on what willmake us a success.
The key point that needs to beunderstood is that from both
sides, if a vendor has a strongconviction to drop you as a
(28:50):
client, they can. And likewise,if a client has a strong
conviction to drop you as avendor or a supplier, they can.
The only thing it means is thatit's how long will it take and
what is the impact of thebusiness. And you can only
imagine that if they make thedecision to change, that means
(29:12):
there was something bigger thanthe commercial impact that is
going on that led to thatdecision. So I think both sides
need to understand that anybodycan choose to change.
Nothing is a given. And whatkeeps you secure in that
relationship is going forwardwith a common platform and a
common, let's say, measurementof success.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
Well, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on
the podcast. Thanks, Tariq.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
That's all for today's episode. Thanks for
listening to Hotel Tech Insiderproduced by hoteltechreport.com.
Our goal with this podcast is toshow you how the best in the
business are leveragingtechnology to grow their
properties and outperform theconcept by using innovative
digital tools and strategies. Iencourage all of our listeners
to go try at least one of thesestrategies or tools that you
(30:03):
learned from today's episode.Successful digital
transformation is all aboutconsistent small experiments
over a long period of time, sodon't wait until tomorrow to try
something new.
Do you know a hotelier who wouldbe great to feature on this
show, or do you think that yourstory would bring a lot of value
to our audience? Reach out to medirectly on LinkedIn by
searching for Jordan Hollander.For more episodes like this,
(30:27):
follow Hotel Tech Insider on allmajor streaming platforms like
Spotify and Apple Music.
I think all sides need to understand that anybody
can choose to change. Nothing isa given. And what keeps you
secure in that relationship isgoing forward with a common
platform and a common, let'ssay, measurement of success.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
From Hotel Tech Report, it's Hotel Tech Insider,
a show about the future ofhotels and the technology that
powers them.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Today, we speak with Tariq Falani, the global SVP of
support services at Accor. Tariqoversees Accor's entire IT
function, and his teams helpeveryone from front desk agents
to GMs who might encounter techchallenges. Tariq talks us
through a few big initiativeshe's led. He also shares shares
(00:44):
how he transformed his team'soperations by training them on
human centric design. Well,welcome to the show, Tarek.
Great to have you here. Verymuch looking forward to covering
some interesting topics withyou. To get us started, I would
love for you to introduceyourself. Tell us a bit about
(01:04):
your role and the company youwork for.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
First off, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure
to be on the show with youtoday. My name is Tariq Balani,
and I'm the global SVP ofsupport services at Accor. In
the role that I currently servein, I essentially look after
support for tech, sales,distribution, and loyalty for
Accor's portfolio across theworld, which is about 5,700
(01:29):
hotels and about 43 brands.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Have you always been in that role at Accor, or how
has your career taken to whereyou are now?
Speaker 1 (01:40):
So I actually started in Accor via the acquisition of
Move and Pick. In Move and Pick,I was serving as the head of
infrastructure, security, andoperations. And post
acquisition, I moved intoAccor's team in The Middle East.
In The Middle East, I startedoff spearheading the integration
of the two companies from aninfrastructure perspective. So
(02:01):
working with the then existingAccor teams, obviously
representing the move and pickteams, and carrying out the
integration.
And once that was done, I tookon various interim roles before
I landed into managing theIndia, Middle East, Africa,
Turkey region, and that's whereI managed about 450 of the Accor
(02:22):
hotels operationally. And fromthen is when I moved into this
current role. So it's been aspan of about five years with
Accor, post Movable Pink, andtwo in the current role that I'm
in.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Well, I know that your discipline is a little bit
different than the typical guestwe have on the podcast here. So
I would love for you to give aquick explainer on what your
support organization does? Whoare the customers or users that
they're helping? And how doesthe organization function within
Accor?
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Sure. So you're right. It is a bit different to,
you know, the normal podcast orinterviews that you have.
However, I would see thefunction that I run as a very
much supportive function of theoperations, if you will. So if
you think about any of thehotels that have issues with
(03:18):
their PCs, moving up tonetworks, etcetera, with sales
applications, with distributionapplications, or loyalty
applications.
From a functional and atechnical perspective, this is
what we look after. So we have alot of, you know, let's say,
hotels that come to us or logtickets saying, I can't do a, b,
(03:40):
and c because my computer isbroken, or you have users of
applications who need to be,let's say, retrained on how to
do certain things within theapplication, and this is where
we come in as well. So it'sactually two parts of the
operation, and we support everysingle hotel.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Are most of the systems that your team supports,
are they vendors? Or does Accorhave some proprietary tech as
well that maybe your team builtand supports? Or is it mostly
supporting third party systems?
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Very good question. So the tech support is a little
bit easier to understand becausethat is your typical desk side
support going up to servers,etcetera, and that's the typical
tech stack that we have acrossdifferent industries as well as
different brands within withinhospitality. However, when you
talk about loyalty anddistribution, that is where
(04:36):
there's a bit more of a flavorand especially with
distribution. We are currentlyusing what we call TARS. It's
essentially the Accorreservation system.
And TARS is a purpose in housebuilt reservation system that
was built quite some time ago,and it has served as well as the
(04:59):
res central reservations. And wewill now be moving to something
that is off the shelf,obviously, a bit more customized
as well, but using a partner,which is Amadeus.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
So I'm just curious, how does that work for your
team? Your team needs to be theexperts on the system and the
people that regular employeesor, you know, front desk agents
would come to you for support ortraining. How do you make sure
that your team is well trainedon a new system?
Speaker 1 (05:29):
So, essentially, you're right. My team does need
to be as good as either thefront desk users, so kind of
like power users themselves. Andthe difference I would say is
that they experience a lot ofthese questions. They experience
a lot of different scenarios,which gives them the ability to
be able to help others. But theydefinitely go through rigorous
(05:53):
training on all the platformsthat we have.
And then, of course, after that,they're writing all the how tos,
the knowledge based articles,publishing videos, and so the
knowledge keeps increasingwithin the team. So they are
definitely learning all of theseapplications, but at a much more
and it's interesting because alot of them do come from either
(06:13):
within hotels or have been therea long time.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
I know one big thing that you've worked on over the
years is humanizing the supportjourney or the support
experience. Can you tell me alittle bit about that journey to
kind of centralize the functionand make it more human?
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Sure. So Accor used to function as eight subregions,
couple of years ago, and therewas a transformation that was
put in place to have us functionas four major regions. So The
Americas, Europe and NorthAfrica, near APAC in Greater
China. Prior to this, we wereactually functioning also with
(06:55):
eight different service desks.And in a lot of the cases, if
not all, we had eight differentservice desk applications.
So with the formation of mydepartment, which happened at
the beginning of 2023, weessentially took on the
challenge to centralize all ofthese service desks into one
(07:17):
global support function. So whatwe do have today is a
centralized level one and leveltwo technical support. And to
your question about thehumanizing part, one of the
things that we did when westarted the journey was take a
step back and look at supportas, you know, a service that we
(07:38):
offer and said, okay. What arethe biggest pain points that we
have? What are the biggest painpoints that the people we are
going to serve have?
And what we then did is beforewe even started to centralize
anything, we started to byidentifying the personas that we
would be dealing with, mappingout the user journeys from
(08:00):
logging a case or an incidentall the way to the resolution.
And that kind of became thebaseline for us to build our
processes on how we actuallysupport. And so we had a a great
partnership with, a companycalled HIT Global, and they run
a program called Humanizing IT.One of the cofounders is
(08:21):
actually a coauthor of ITILfour, and she launched this
program simply because whilereviewing ITIL four, she
realized that there wasn't asingle picture of a human being
in the book. And that's when itkinda struck to say, well, hold
on a second.
We are serving people, but wedon't have people at the heart
(08:43):
of what we're doing. And this ishow the whole concept was born.
And so with HitGlobal, weactually managed to build out
our service desk or ourcentralized global service desk.
And in addition to that, we wentso I've put through over 600
agents through the humanizing ITcourse, which essentially has
(09:06):
taught them all about customerservice, personas, and putting
the user and their feelings andessentially empathizing with the
person that you're supporting inorder to understand how to act,
how to prioritize, andunderstanding the severity of
what that individual is feelingat that very moment so that you
(09:28):
can kind of, you know, servethem better and leave them with
a much better feeling than whenthey came in.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
Just rewinding a little bit to the topic of
centralizing support. So youmentioned there were eight
different teams, basically,eight different service desks.
What was the decision processwhen it came to centralizing?
Like, what did you see as thepros to centralizing cons of
keeping them separate? Becausethat's a big decision, and I
(09:57):
would imagine that framework canapply to a lot of different
things.
You know, maybe if you have ahandful of hotels, they all have
individual reservations teams.Like, what's that decision
process when you're thinking ofcombining them?
Speaker 1 (10:12):
When we analyzed the eight different service desks,
we found that some of theservice desks were actually
utilizing the same externaloutsource partner. Some of them
had internal service desks orwith a local flavor with an
outsource partner. And soeveryone was kind of doing their
(10:34):
own thing. And the reality isthat the level one of that
service worked quite well evenwhen it was split into the
eight. However, level tworesided more at a corporate
level.
And so what we had and what wasone of the biggest drivers of
centralizing was the fact thatlevel one and level two were not
(10:56):
very cohesive. And bycentralizing, what we did is we
made level one and level twointo one team. So if you can
imagine, we had eight servicedesks of level one, and we had
one central level two. We tookthe level two, combined it into
one team with the level one. Andthen all we did was with the
(11:17):
collapse of the regions ontothemselves to form bigger
regions, we just made that intoone service desk.
And what they do now is abide bythe same processes and the same
philosophy, the same vision, thesame mission. And so a user of
any of our hotels or in any ofour hotels could essentially
(11:38):
work in, I would say, a Novotelin Sao Paulo and go to a Novotel
or an Ibis or a Pullman or aMowen Pick in Sydney and have
the same support experiencetoday. So whereas in the past,
it would have been verydifferent. It would have been
very regional specific. And nowyou have that single user
(12:00):
experience, or at least if I cansay that's where we strive to
be.
It's not an overnight journey.It's not something super easy to
accomplish. We have done quite abit of work to get to where we
are today. And of course, asalways, we have more to do.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
How do you handle the trade offs between having very
standardized procedures or verystandardized operation, but also
having the flexibility toaccount for those regional
differences. You know, I canimagine those are two different
ends of the spectrum that arealways pulling you in two
directions.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Right. So I think the key to to look at here is the
fact that those processes andprocedures are built in such a
way that they can be applied todifferent applications or
different technology stacks. Thekey is not to be rigid, but the
key is to give the teams a wayto operate, which gives them the
(12:55):
comfort to understand what'snext. That can also include
things like escalation parts,you know, service level
agreements or objectives. Alsowithin the organization having
operating level agreements.
So all of this is what we wantedto achieve because you would
have two different teams, the lone or level one handing off to
(13:19):
a specialist team. But betweenthe two teams, there was never
an agreement of how quick theywould respond or serve the team
that escalated. And so there's alot to be said. I mean, even
though the applications aredifferent, but there's a lot to
be said about having thoseinternal agreements and ways of
working to kind of make things alot easier for the agents to be
(13:39):
able to provide a a superiorservice.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
I wanna get back to the customer centered, human
centered service conversation.So one thing that you mentioned
that I thought was interestingwas the idea of encouraging
agents to think of the persona,who they're working with. Can
you give me an example of what apersona might be for someone
(14:03):
that one of your agents washelping?
Speaker 1 (14:06):
Sure. So, I mean, if you look at a typical hotel, you
could have a front desk agent,you could have a finance and
accounting manager, you couldhave the general manager, you
could have somebody in sales.And the idea of understanding
these personas, and we do haveI'll just sidetrack for a second
before I answer the question,but we work currently today with
(14:29):
internal teams as well asoutsource partners. And one of
the key points is that we ensurethat regardless of what type of
team it is or because first ofall, we all consider it as one
team. And the second part is wehave to have that knowledge of
the hospitality industry.
And so the idea here is toensure even if we have outsource
(14:52):
partners who, you know, get infresh people who have never
worked in hospitality, part ofthe onboarding is to understand
the business and understandingthose personas is part of that.
And so to the question, it'sessentially saying that if you
understand what the individualdoes, it allows you to execute
(15:12):
in a much more efficient manner.And the example I always give,
which kind of makes it easy, isto say, imagine you had a ticket
or a call from a front deskagent who has a check-in line of
20 people, and they have anissue with their computer or
unable to log in to Opera. Andthen at the same time, you have
(15:34):
a ticket or a call from afinance manager who has an issue
with the formula in Excel.Understanding those two
personas, understanding thelevel of pressure that sits with
each one, understanding, youknow, at that very moment, what
is the contribution to ourbusiness, to our reputation, to
(15:55):
the customer satisfaction, whichis the ultimate goal.
Right? The guest experience andthe customer satisfaction. This
is how we then help them to workit back and say, listen. The
biggest impact on userexperience or guest experience
and customer satisfaction willbe that check-in line. And
therefore, this is your priorityto help that front office agent.
(16:17):
They may not be as seniorranking in the hotel. It doesn't
matter. Their particular job atthat particular time is what
really matters, and that's whereyou need to focus your help. I
mean, the key is that in thepast, it would have been it's
the GM. Okay.
I need to go and serve the GM.But at the same time, we're all
(16:38):
well aware that if theindividual supporting are given
the tools to understand thesepersonas, they are also in a
position to turn around to theGM and say, look. I have one of
your front office agents who'scurrently experiencing a long
line of check ins. They'reunable to work. Would you mind
if I go back to them and helpthem and then come back to you?
(17:01):
I can almost guarantee you thatevery single GM will turn around
and say, yes. Forget about me.Go and help them. Right? And so
it's it's a lot better to beable to understand the business
and the personas to be able toexplain what you're doing and
why as opposed to just, youknow, if you kinda say, oh, I'll
put you on hold or I'll get backto you when I can without that
(17:23):
explanation or showing that GMthat you understand their pain,
but this is what you're doingfor them in another way, that's
what makes it a lot easier.
And it takes one incident tolose a loyalty member. Right?
And when you look at the cost ofacquisition of a member and when
(17:44):
you look at a service that yourender and you could have
avoided losing that member,that's what makes it a little
more interesting as well. Soand, typically, this is not
something that is passed downthe ranks. You know, at a
managerial layer, this wouldsomewhat be understood, or at
the top ranks, it's even moreunderstood.
But when you get down to asupport level one agent who is
(18:07):
so far removed from thebusiness, they will never stop
to think about that kind of animpact. And so this is what we
wanted to actually achieve wasto make them more involved and
trained so that they understandthe business and the impact that
they have.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
I'm just curious if you're able to share. Is there
some component of theircompensation or performance
review or something like thatthat takes these factors into
account? Or how are theyencouraged to always keep those
things front of mind?
Speaker 1 (18:39):
When it comes to the internal teams, it formed a part
of their learning anddevelopment plan for the year.
So 2024 saw us do the 600trainings. And so the 600 are
broken down, like I said, intointernal, external, and
outsource. For the internalteams, it was part of their
(19:00):
learning and development plan.And for the external and
outsource, we also did the samething.
So we worked with a fantasticpartner called ITC Infotech out
of India. They have, I think,just a bit over 50% of my team
sits with them in Bangalore. Andthey did a fantastic job through
(19:20):
their own learning anddevelopment department to take
every single person in my teamthrough this course. And so it
wasn't even though it was acomputer based training, we
still had members of the HITGlobal Humanizing IT team come
into India as well. There was aroad show that we did in Paris,
(19:40):
in Bangalore, in Bangkok wherewe have most of the members.
So it was kind of a lot aroundcommunication, a lot around
building that momentum to keeppeople engaged to understand why
we're doing what we're doing,involving learning and
development. And after it, whatwe actually did was look at the
(20:00):
impact of these courses. Andspecifically within ITC, when we
looked at agents that hadcompleted because it was a
rolling course. So you had some,of course, that finished it the
minute we launched in, you know,I think we started in March of
twenty twenty four. And so byMay, you had a whole bunch of
(20:20):
people who had completed, andthen, of course, you had some
that completed in December.
And so you still saw that therewere batches of the team that
completed along the way. And ifyou look at the scoring customer
satisfaction for tickets theyhad taken, handling time,
etcetera, you could see thedifference from before. And
(20:42):
let's say, we measured, I thinkit was about three, four months
after completion of the course.And so there was a visible
difference for sure.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
So what metrics are you measuring to see the impact
there? Is there, like, a usersatisfaction or or issue
resolution time or somethinglike that?
Speaker 1 (21:02):
I mean, we did initially say that it is not
something that you can typicallymeasure because when you look at
customer satisfaction, right, alot of the time you will get
customer feedback when peopleare upset with the service that
you provide. You do, however,get a lot of people giving their
(21:23):
feedback when they're happy. Butwhat counts is actually the
verbal or the written feedbackthat you get. And so what we
tried to do was combine that bytaking those agents that had
completed the course, looking attheir tickets, looking at those
that gave feedback, positivefeedback in the form of a
(21:44):
customer satisfaction score. Andthen the learning and
development teams, along withthe team managers, reached out
to the users who actuallyexperienced that service and
asked them if they would bewilling to give us that
feedback.
And, essentially, we did manageto collect a lot of feedback
from the teams simply because itwas one on one, it was not
(22:07):
system generated. It wasactually somebody reaching out
to say, look, this is what wedid. This is what happened. This
is what we're expecting. Now canyou give us your experience from
before and after?
And particularly about this, youknow, incident, what did you
think? And this is where we gotthe positive response.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Just so our listeners can clearly understand what
you're talking about with ahuman centric approach. Can you
give me an example of how aninteraction might differ in the
old way of doing things versusthe new way that has a more
human centric approach?
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Well, I think we kinda touched on an example of
the GM and and, you know, thefront office agent. But it's
also about when we talk abouthuman centered design, it's
about understanding the problem,you know, brainstorming the
ideas, and then looking at thepossible solutions and then
trying them out, but also havingthe ability to iterate what you
(23:08):
do. Right? And so with regardsto the human part of it, when we
were designing the processes ofcase to incident, we actually
mapped out the different stepsthat a ticket would go through,
understood what needed to bedone in a quicker way, what
needed to be done with moreempathy, understood who is
(23:29):
sitting behind each layer ofthat ticket, and how do we get
it out the other side in a more,let's say, effective manner.
Right?
And so that's one part of it.And the other part of it is
understanding that we're notdealing with machines, we're
dealing with people. And justputting on blinders and saying,
(23:51):
well, this is my process. Ican't help you if you don't fit
into my process. That wassomething we also kind of moved
away from.
So it's all well and good tohave the processes and
procedures, but it's also aboutdesigning for the circumstance
and also empowering the agentsto be able to make decisions to
(24:13):
kind of deviate a little bitwhere they feel they need to in
order to have the right outcome.And accountability is a big one
on this. What we find in atypical service desk is that I
take a ticket, I do my bid, andif I escalate, then that's where
it ends for me because it's nowgone to level two. But what
(24:35):
we've done is we said, okay.First and foremost, whoever
takes the ticket in level one,you own that.
The ownership for the entirelife cycle is yours. And what
that means is that when theyescalate to level two, they're
still responsible to follow-up.Right? And the same way if level
(24:55):
two escalate to level three,they still have that ownership
to follow-up with level threebecause they're still gonna get
follow ups from level one. Soit's kind of having
accountability.
It's making sure that you kindof know that the person on the
other end who opened that ticketopened it for a reason. They
(25:15):
need your help. Otherwise, theywouldn't have opened a ticket.
And so it's not just aboutfollowing the process and then
ignoring things. It's aboutmaking sure you come through and
deliver.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
So one other topic I wanted to ask about. I
understand that you have somekey vendor relationships. Of
course, the system that you useor that all of your agents use
to to handle tickets and so on.Can you talk to me a bit about
your vendor relationships? Howdo you think about those
relationships as partnerships?
How do those relationships helpdrive your work forward?
Speaker 1 (25:50):
So I think the key or the biggest example I can give
you is, like I mentioned, IPC.They are one of our biggest
partners. And while we don'tprocure a system from them, you
know, we have people with them.And that makes it all the more
(26:10):
tricky because, you know, you'renot just dealing with a piece of
software. You're dealing withhuman beings.
And so that's one part. And toextend on that, ITC have kind of
come into our model, which iswhat we like to do is work as a
partner. And when we startedoff, there were a lot of
elements that were new to bothsides. And we walked in and we
(26:33):
said, okay. We're committed togetting this done.
We aligned on what the visionwas. We aligned on what success
looks like. And it was amazingto see that, you know, you come
into this partnership, and theywere willing to come to the
table, admit when they mademistakes, also come to the table
(26:55):
and tell us when we mademistakes. And, of course, both
sides were happy to acceptbecause the way the partnership
was built was that we're notcoming to the table to highlight
mistakes because we wanna goafter each other, whether it's
commercially or blame orwhatever, but it's to make each
other better. And we have donethis so many times.
(27:18):
They have literally opened theirdoors to us and said, okay.
Well, if you think we're notdoing this in the right way,
tell us. What would you like usto change? And so we have, you
know, managed serviceagreements, which hold true.
However, if we advise them tochange certain elements of their
(27:39):
managed service, they do so.
And at the same time, if thereare certain elements internally
for us that are not working,they come to us and advise us
and say, look, this particularbit that you have internally
doesn't work, and we fix that.Because at the end of the day,
it's the entire loop that wehave together. We form a big
(28:00):
part of it. They form a big partof it. But at the end, the
recipient is the hotels.
Right? And so this partnershipmodel that we have, being open
minded, and it works like thiswith a lot of the other partners
we have. So including withHitGlobal, you know, we have the
same sort of a model whereeverything is done together. A
(28:24):
very big collaboration,understanding, you know, what
are the common goals, what arethe common metrics of success.
And I think this is what hasenabled us to be successful
because we align on what willmake us a success.
The key point that needs to beunderstood is that from both
sides, if a vendor has a strongconviction to drop you as a
(28:50):
client, they can. And likewise,if a client has a strong
conviction to drop you as avendor or a supplier, they can.
The only thing it means is thatit's how long will it take and
what is the impact of thebusiness. And you can only
imagine that if they make thedecision to change, that means
(29:12):
there was something bigger thanthe commercial impact that is
going on that led to thatdecision. So I think both sides
need to understand that anybodycan choose to change.
Nothing is a given. And whatkeeps you secure in that
relationship is going forwardwith a common platform and a
common, let's say, measurementof success.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
Well, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on
the podcast. Thanks, Tariq.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
That's all for today's episode. Thanks for
listening to Hotel Tech Insiderproduced by hoteltechreport.com.
Our goal with this podcast is toshow you how the best in the
business are leveragingtechnology to grow their
properties and outperform theconcept by using innovative
digital tools and strategies. Iencourage all of our listeners
to go try at least one of thesestrategies or tools that you
(30:03):
learned from today's episode.Successful digital
transformation is all aboutconsistent small experiments
over a long period of time, sodon't wait until tomorrow to try
something new.
Do you know a hotelier who wouldbe great to feature on this
show, or do you think that yourstory would bring a lot of value
to our audience? Reach out to medirectly on LinkedIn by
searching for Jordan Hollander.For more episodes like this,
(30:27):
follow Hotel Tech Insider on allmajor streaming platforms like
Spotify and Apple Music.
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