Paper Sample on AccorHotels: Digital Transformation for Customer Engagement

Introduction

Digital transformation is the procedure of utilising digital technologies to build new or improve existing business cultures and client experiences in an attempt to meet the changing market requirements. The reimagining of business in this sense is digital transformation. This transformation transcends the traditional duties like customer service, sales, and marketing. The revolution rather focuses on customer engagement. AccorHotels, also known as Accor, are a chain of luxury hotels with branches in several countries in the world. The franchise is famous for its exemplary customer service and their personal touch in customer interactions. However, lately, the company has had digital disruptions, which unbalanced the company’s equilibrium. These digital disruptions cultivated the emergence of new factors in the hospitality industry, such as active forums, pure review websites, and online travel agents. Also, the interruptions created a new species of competition like Airbnb, which is an alternative lodging and OneFineStay, a version of Airbnb with an upmarket. Frequent with these digital interruptions was the accelerated accumulation of content that subsequently influenced the behavior of a majority of the customers when planning and purchasing. Because of these disruptions that threatened the business, hotels such as Accor needed to reevaluate their approach in creating an online presence and reputation.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Problems Arising from Digital Transformation

Digital transformation significantly shifted customer expectations in the hotelier industry. This shift allowed clients to connect with others as well as share their experiences. Modern-day customers require less hand-holding and faster feedback, starting from their bookings and payments to the hotel connectivity (Nassar, 2012). Furthermore, with the omnipresence of mobile devices, certain apps such as WhatsApp are crucial for hotel interactions with their customers. These mobile devices also raised the standard for organizational agility, Accor needed to adapt to cope with the level of developments and use them to their advantage. The number of actors in the hospitality ecosystem also increased with the digital revolution. Previously, travel agents such as Thomson Holidays would be the first option when one was planning a trip to facilitate flights, reserve hotel rooms, among other associated services (Nassar, 2012). Hotel representatives typically visited these agents who, in turn, gave customers bundled deals that they had no choice but to accept. However, the emergence of the new players in the industry sought to challenge these relationships by providing multiple ways to unbundle these deals, allowing the customers to pick their preferences. Therefore, for Accor to adequately compete with these new players who challenged the status quo, the hotelier had to consider the content and journey of their customers as well as techniques of leveraging content to better their services and provide longevity to their brand.

Factors Affecting Digital Revolution

Shift in Power

Far from the impact in revenues experienced in the hotelier business, these businesses had to adjust to the paradigm shift of consumers taking control of product education using sources such as bloggers, reviews, and social media. In the past, travelers relied on guidebooks and brochures. However, this digital age allows them to read and watch these experiences of individuals who have already visited these places. As such, clients are more autonomous than before, with nearly 90% of them reading reviews about tourist destinations without the aid of the front desk services (Morris, 2009). Customers now feel empowered to complain more and expect more from hotels. Also, alternative service providers such as Airbnb molded their guest experiences a bit more differently and built expectations that their clientele is more than happy to share. The concept of Airbnb was so successful that Bazin, AccorHotel CEO was enthusiastic about wanting to participate in the business. Also, it is increasingly difficult to segment customers into the economy, mid-market, or luxury titles. Clients now would rather have a myriad of categories such as the young HENRYs (High Earners, Not Rich Yet), a demographic with substantial spending power, and value brands and brand values more than legacies. The emergence of “lifestyle hotels” according to Faisal (2016), moreover caters to separate aspects such as sustainability and design rather than budgetary parameters, and is a response to the evolved customer needs.

Rise of Online Content

The root of the tectonic shift of power to consumers is the increased exchange of information, made possible with the internet and mobile technology that explosively advanced online content. The number of smartphones significantly increased from nearly 200 million to about 2 billion between 2008 and 2015 (Dubois, 2016). Each minute, Facebook users share about 2 million bits of information, Twitter has individuals retweeting almost 300,000 times, YouTube has nearly 72 hours of uploads of new content, and Instagram has about 200,000 new photos (Dubois, 2016). The authentic photographs and videos shared on Facebook and Instagram create awareness within the customer community because they are shareable. Furthermore, the testimonials, stories of success and failures featured on these platforms aid the clients to be more decisive when choosing a hotel. Other forms of content including press releases, e-books, and how-to guides are highly accurate in provision of practical information to travelers such as hotel features, pricing, availability dates, among others. For this reason, it is necessary that a hotel has a strong online presence on these platforms, as a basis for competition.

Review Sites and the Role of Trust

The main feature of the digital world involves the arrangement of interest groups on online networks online, where they share information freely. According to Busca and Bertrandias (2020), group-forming tendencies on online platforms mimic historical human interaction in the pursuit of efficiency, from prehistoric times for hunting to present times. Similarly, there is enhanced efficiency by the content provided by individuals who have confidence in social dynamics, i.e., people who share their experiences visiting particular places. These people have separate roles in the digital space, ranging from experts to admirers and testifiers. Particularly, people with multiple admirers gain “influencer” status, usually those with thousands of followers reading and noticing their opinions. This advancement led to the running of economic activity through trust between strangers. Organizations like Yelp capitalized on the trend, experiencing a seismic growth in revenues from nearly $30 million in 2010 to about $500 million in 2015 (Dubois, 2016). Therefore, such dynamic growth in revenues signifies the shift of power from an organizational trust to peer trust, where customers believe the authentic experiences of strangers online rather than the institution representatives (Busca & Bertrandias, 2020).

Solutions

Digital transformation is a force that is here to stay and evolve into a different dynamic, thus making it inescapable. As such, Accor should aim to salvage the current situation, as well as set up initiatives to ensure continuity and avoid missing such an opportunity for business in the future. Some of the alternatives the hotel could consider to improve its online presence and become a content-creating organization are as below.

Social Media Listening

In the past, information was difficult to obtain and hotels mostly relied on placing a car on the client’s dressing table for customer feedback, which was usually too late to make any changes. Social media and digital marketing allowed companies to access customer insights faster through two major channels: building a reliable feedback loop online through emailing consumers to comment on their experience; using online information sourced from numerous customers engaging in travel-based conversations on platforms such as Instagram or Facebook. Social media listening is a modern tool, developed in the early 2000s that allowed businesses to identify and analyse qualitative and quantitative information about a target on the internet (Dubois 2016). Large corporations adopted a social media listening system that allows them an awareness of social conversations. Hence, Accor should set up a centralized system with individuals monitoring conversations regarding their hotel and respond to urgent customers.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media Listening

Social media listening facilitates unfiltered opinions. According to Morris (2009), this tool would allow Accor to gather the customers’ unfiltered opinions and thoughts, typically less filtered than they would share on a survey, making them authentic. Besides, a majority of the social mention tool can store and give access to data for up to 30 months, while others are capable of retrieving older information but at an additional cost (Valand & Gaur, 2020) Therefore, the organization can begin an online trending program and compare conversations between the past and the present, and analyse the data accordingly. Also, social listening provides an opportunity to use videos, images, or emoji to help the company understand the consumer thoughts and actions better than a traditional method would. However, the same social media listening tools can be a significant disadvantage to companies. This tool does not offer any guarantees. Due to the different nature of social listening to traditional market research, one cannot be sure what kind of information they will get online (Ryan & Jones, 2014). Furthermore, social listening does not work alone and requires other information to compliment it. Therefore, in as much as social media listening is a useful tool in online research, it is critical to evaluate more information that would enable an organization to get the most out of it.

Content Creation

Creating content is also an avenue for the hotel to establish its presence and reputation. The two sources of content are user-generated content (UGC) and content published by the organization. UGC gives readily available data typically aimed to entertain or persuade the audience and, as such, have a significant appeal (Faisal, 2016). The latter, on the other hand, comprises descriptions of the hotel on the website, definition of utilities or services, and usually aims to convert or educate.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Content Creation

Content creation would allow the hotel to reach significant audiences. Because millions of people use social media, having the business on online platforms would permit more people to appreciate the products offered (Valand & Gaur, 2020). Furthermore, this tool gives a direct connection with the audience and, as a result, it is simpler getting authentic responses and provides customer service to their liking. Content creation also allows the opportunity to design organic content. According to Faisal (2016), this advantage would grant the hotel to be as creative as possible on social media platforms while also not limiting how much content the organization can post to engage with their audience. Lastly, the hotel would have access to paid advertising services such as Facebook Business Ads that allows the hotel to build a reputable brand online (Valand & Gaur, 2020). However, content creation is also a potential for embarrassment to the hotel. Individuals are keen on the posts online. Therefore, the hotel should be cautious with the content posted. The tool also requires the organization to spend several hours working on campaigns. As such, the p...