The HotelTechInsider podcast interviews the top leaders at the convergence of hotels, travel and technology. Guests include founders, executives, top hoteliers and industry organization leadership. Find all of the episodes at hoteltechreport.com
I think all sides need to understand that anybody can choose to change. Nothing is a given. And what keeps you secure in that relationship is going forward with a common platform and a common, let's say, measurement of success.
Speaker 2:From Hotel Tech Report, it's Hotel Tech Insider, a show about the future of hotels and the technology that powers them.
Speaker 3:Today, we speak with Tariq Falani, the global SVP of support services at Accor. Tariq oversees Accor's entire IT function, and his teams help everyone from front desk agents to GMs who might encounter tech challenges. Tariq talks us through a few big initiatives he's led. He also shares shares how he transformed his team's operations by training them on human centric design. Well, welcome to the show, Tarek.
Speaker 3:Great to have you here. Very much looking forward to covering some interesting topics with you. To get us started, I would love for you to introduce yourself. Tell us a bit about your role and the company you work for.
Speaker 1:First off, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be on the show with you today. My name is Tariq Balani, and I'm the global SVP of support services at Accor. In the role that I currently serve in, I essentially look after support for tech, sales, distribution, and loyalty for Accor's portfolio across the world, which is about 5,700 hotels and about 43 brands.
Speaker 3:Have you always been in that role at Accor, or how has your career taken to where you are now?
Speaker 1: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, and operations. And post acquisition, I moved into Accor's team in The Middle East. In The Middle East, I started off spearheading the integration of the two companies from an infrastructure perspective. So working with the then existing Accor teams, obviously representing the move and pick teams, and carrying out the integration.
Speaker 1:And once that was done, I took on various interim roles before I landed into managing the India, Middle East, Africa, Turkey region, and that's where I managed about 450 of the Accor hotels operationally. And from then is when I moved into this current role. So it's been a span of about five years with Accor, post Movable Pink, and two in the current role that I'm in.
Speaker 3:Well, I know that your discipline is a little bit different than the typical guest we have on the podcast here. So I would love for you to give a quick explainer on what your support organization does? Who are the customers or users that they're helping? And how does the organization function within Accor?
Speaker 1:Sure. So you're right. It is a bit different to, you know, the normal podcast or interviews that you have. However, I would see the function that I run as a very much supportive function of the operations, if you will. So if you think about any of the hotels that have issues with their PCs, moving up to networks, etcetera, with sales applications, with distribution applications, or loyalty applications.
Speaker 1:From a functional and a technical perspective, this is what we look after. So we have a lot of, you know, let's say, hotels that come to us or log tickets saying, I can't do a, b, and c because my computer is broken, or you have users of applications who need to be, let's say, retrained on how to do certain things within the application, and this is where we come in as well. So it's actually two parts of the operation, and we support every single hotel.
Speaker 3:Are most of the systems that your team supports, are they vendors? Or does Accor have some proprietary tech as well that maybe your team built and supports? Or is it mostly supporting third party systems?
Speaker 1:Very good question. So the tech support is a little bit easier to understand because that is your typical desk side support going up to servers, etcetera, and that's the typical tech stack that we have across different industries as well as different brands within within hospitality. However, when you talk about loyalty and distribution, that is where there's a bit more of a flavor and especially with distribution. We are currently using what we call TARS. It's essentially the Accor reservation system.
Speaker 1:And TARS is a purpose in house built reservation system that was built quite some time ago, and it has served as well as the res central reservations. And we will 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:So I'm just curious, how does that work for your team? Your team needs to be the experts on the system and the people that regular employees or, you know, front desk agents would come to you for support or training. How do you make sure that your team is well trained on a new system?
Speaker 1:So, essentially, you're right. My team does need to be as good as either the front desk users, so kind of like power users themselves. And the difference I would say is that they experience a lot of these questions. They experience a lot of different scenarios, which gives them the ability to be able to help others. But they definitely go through rigorous training on all the platforms that we have.
Speaker 1:And then, of course, after that, they're writing all the how tos, the knowledge based articles, publishing videos, and so the knowledge keeps increasing within the team. So they are definitely learning all of these applications, but at a much more and it's interesting because a lot of them do come from either within hotels or have been there a long time.
Speaker 3:I know one big thing that you've worked on over the years is humanizing the support journey or the support experience. Can you tell me a little bit about that journey to kind of centralize the function and make it more human?
Speaker 1:Sure. So Accor used to function as eight subregions, couple of years ago, and there was a transformation that was put in place to have us function as four major regions. So The Americas, Europe and North Africa, near APAC in Greater China. Prior to this, we were actually functioning also with eight different service desks. And in a lot of the cases, if not all, we had eight different service desk applications.
Speaker 1:So with the formation of my department, which happened at the beginning of 2023, we essentially took on the challenge to centralize all of these service desks into one global support function. So what we do have today is a centralized level one and level two technical support. And to your question about the humanizing part, one of the things that we did when we started the journey was take a step back and look at support as, you know, a service that we offer and said, okay. What are the biggest pain points that we have? What are the biggest pain points that the people we are going to serve have?
Speaker 1:And what we then did is before we even started to centralize anything, we started to by identifying the personas that we would be dealing with, mapping out the user journeys from logging a case or an incident all the way to the resolution. And that kind of became the baseline for us to build our processes on how we actually support. And so we had a a great partnership with, a company called HIT Global, and they run a program called Humanizing IT. One of the cofounders is actually a coauthor of ITIL four, and she launched this program simply because while reviewing ITIL four, she realized that there wasn't a single picture of a human being in the book. And that's when it kinda struck to say, well, hold on a second.
Speaker 1:We are serving people, but we don't have people at the heart of what we're doing. And this is how the whole concept was born. And so with HitGlobal, we actually managed to build out our service desk or our centralized global service desk. And in addition to that, we went so I've put through over 600 agents through the humanizing IT course, which essentially has taught them all about customer service, personas, and putting the user and their feelings and essentially empathizing with the person that you're supporting in order to understand how to act, how to prioritize, and understanding the severity of what that individual is feeling at that very moment so that you can kind of, you know, serve them better and leave them with a much better feeling than when they came in.
Speaker 3:Just rewinding a little bit to the topic of centralizing support. So you mentioned there were eight different teams, basically, eight different service desks. What was the decision process when it came to centralizing? Like, what did you see as the pros to centralizing cons of keeping them separate? Because that's a big decision, and I would imagine that framework can apply to a lot of different things.
Speaker 3:You know, maybe if you have a handful of hotels, they all have individual reservations teams. Like, what's that decision process when you're thinking of combining them?
Speaker 1:When we analyzed the eight different service desks, we found that some of the service desks were actually utilizing the same external outsource partner. Some of them had internal service desks or with a local flavor with an outsource partner. And so everyone was kind of doing their own thing. And the reality is that the level one of that service worked quite well even when it was split into the eight. However, level two resided more at a corporate level.
Speaker 1:And so what we had and what was one of the biggest drivers of centralizing was the fact that level one and level two were not very cohesive. And by centralizing, what we did is we made level one and level two into one team. So if you can imagine, we had eight service desks of level one, and we had one central level two. We took the level two, combined it into one team with the level one. And then all we did was with the collapse of the regions onto themselves to form bigger regions, we just made that into one service desk.
Speaker 1:And what they do now is abide by the same processes and the same philosophy, the same vision, the same mission. And so a user of any of our hotels or in any of our hotels could essentially work in, I would say, a Novotel in Sao Paulo and go to a Novotel or an Ibis or a Pullman or a Mowen Pick in Sydney and have the same support experience today. So whereas in the past, it would have been very different. It would have been very regional specific. And now you have that single user experience, or at least if I can say that's where we strive to be.
Speaker 1:It's not an overnight journey. It's not something super easy to accomplish. We have done quite a bit of work to get to where we are today. And of course, as always, we have more to do.
Speaker 3:How do you handle the trade offs between having very standardized procedures or very standardized operation, but also having the flexibility to account for those regional differences. You know, I can imagine those are two different ends of the spectrum that are always pulling you in two directions.
Speaker 1:Right. So I think the key to to look at here is the fact that those processes and procedures are built in such a way that they can be applied to different applications or different technology stacks. The key is not to be rigid, but the key is to give the teams a way to operate, which gives them the comfort to understand what's next. That can also include things like escalation parts, you know, service level agreements or objectives. Also within the organization having operating level agreements.
Speaker 1:So all of this is what we wanted to achieve because you would have two different teams, the l one or level one handing off to a specialist team. But between the two teams, there was never an agreement of how quick they would respond or serve the team that escalated. And so there's a lot to be said. I mean, even though the applications are different, but there's a lot to be said about having those internal agreements and ways of working to kind of make things a lot easier for the agents to be able to provide a a superior service.
Speaker 3:I wanna get back to the customer centered, human centered service conversation. So one thing that you mentioned that I thought was interesting was the idea of encouraging agents to think of the persona, who they're working with. Can you give me an example of what a persona might be for someone that one of your agents was helping?
Speaker 1: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 could have the general manager, you could have somebody in sales. And the idea of understanding these personas, and we do have I'll just sidetrack for a second before I answer the question, but we work currently today with internal teams as well as outsource partners. And one of the key points is that we ensure that regardless of what type of team it is or because first of all, we all consider it as one team. And the second part is we have to have that knowledge of the hospitality industry.
Speaker 1:And so the idea here is to ensure even if we have outsource partners who, you know, get in fresh people who have never worked in hospitality, part of the onboarding is to understand the business and understanding those personas is part of that. And so to the question, it's essentially saying that if you understand what the individual does, it allows you to execute in a much more efficient manner. And the example I always give, which kind of makes it easy, is to say, imagine you had a ticket or a call from a front desk agent who has a check-in line of 20 people, and they have an issue with their computer or unable to log in to Opera. And then at the same time, you have a ticket or a call from a finance manager who has an issue with the formula in Excel. Understanding those two personas, understanding the level of pressure that sits with each one, understanding, you know, at that very moment, what is the contribution to our business, to our reputation, to the customer satisfaction, which is the ultimate goal.
Speaker 1:Right? The guest experience and the customer satisfaction. This is how we then help them to work it back and say, listen. The biggest impact on user experience or guest experience and customer satisfaction will be that check-in line. And therefore, this is your priority to help that front office agent.
Speaker 1:They may not be as senior ranking in the hotel. It doesn't matter. Their particular job at that particular time is what really matters, and that's where you need to focus your help. I mean, the key is that in the past, it would have been it's the GM. Okay.
Speaker 1:I need to go and serve the GM. But at the same time, we're all well aware that if the individual supporting are given the tools to understand these personas, they are also in a position to turn around to the GM and say, look. I have one of your front office agents who's currently experiencing a long line of check ins. They're unable to work. Would you mind if I go back to them and help them and then come back to you?
Speaker 1:I can almost guarantee you that every 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 be able to understand the business and the personas to be able to explain what you're doing and why as opposed to just, you know, if you kinda say, oh, I'll put you on hold or I'll get back to you when I can without that explanation or showing that GM that you understand their pain, but this is what you're doing for them in another way, that's what makes it a lot easier.
Speaker 1:And it takes one incident to lose a loyalty member. Right? And when you look at the cost of acquisition of a member and when you look at a service that you render and you could have avoided losing that member, that's what makes it a little more interesting as well. So and, typically, this is not something that is passed down the ranks. You know, at a managerial layer, this would somewhat be understood, or at the top ranks, it's even more understood.
Speaker 1:But when you get down to a support level one agent who is so far removed from the business, they will never stop to think about that kind of an impact. And so this is what we wanted to actually achieve was to make them more involved and trained so that they understand the business and the impact that they have.
Speaker 3:I'm just curious if you're able to share. Is there some component of their compensation or performance review or something like that that takes these factors into account? Or how are they encouraged to always keep those things front of mind?
Speaker 1:When it comes to the internal teams, it formed a part of their learning and development plan for the year. So 2024 saw us do the 600 trainings. And so the 600 are broken down, like I said, into internal, external, and outsource. For the internal teams, it was part of their learning and development plan. And for the external and outsource, we also did the same thing.
Speaker 1:So we worked with a fantastic partner called ITC Infotech out of India. They have, I think, just a bit over 50% of my team sits with them in Bangalore. And they did a fantastic job through their own learning and development department to take every single person in my team through this course. And so it wasn't even though it was a computer based training, we still had members of the HIT Global Humanizing IT team come into India as well. There was a road show that we did in Paris, in Bangalore, in Bangkok where we have most of the members.
Speaker 1:So it was kind of a lot around communication, a lot around building that momentum to keep people engaged to understand why we're doing what we're doing, involving learning and development. And after it, what we actually did was look at the impact of these courses. And specifically within ITC, when we looked at agents that had completed 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 by May, you had a whole bunch of people who had completed, and then, of course, you had some that completed in December.
Speaker 1:And so you still saw that there were batches of the team that completed along the way. And if you look at the scoring customer satisfaction for tickets they had taken, handling time, etcetera, you could see the difference from before. And let's say, we measured, I think it was about three, four months after completion of the course. And so there was a visible difference for sure.
Speaker 3:So what metrics are you measuring to see the impact there? Is there, like, a user satisfaction or or issue resolution time or something like that?
Speaker 1:I mean, we did initially say that it is not something that you can typically measure because when you look at customer satisfaction, right, a lot of the time you will get customer feedback when people are upset with the service that you provide. You do, however, get a lot of people giving their feedback when they're happy. But what counts is actually the verbal or the written feedback that you get. And so what we tried to do was combine that by taking those agents that had completed the course, looking at their tickets, looking at those that gave feedback, positive feedback in the form of a customer satisfaction score. And then the learning and development teams, along with the team managers, reached out to the users who actually experienced that service and asked them if they would be willing to give us that feedback.
Speaker 1:And, essentially, we did manage to collect a lot of feedback from the teams simply because it was one on one, it was not system generated. It was actually somebody reaching out to say, look, this is what we did. This is what happened. This is what we're expecting. Now can you give us your experience from before and after?
Speaker 1:And particularly about this, you know, incident, what did you think? And this is where we got the positive response.
Speaker 3:Just so our listeners can clearly understand what you're talking about with a human centric approach. Can you give me an example of how an interaction might differ in the old way of doing things versus the new way that has a more human centric approach?
Speaker 1:Well, I think we kinda touched on an example of the GM and and, you know, the front office agent. But it's also about when we talk about human centered design, it's about understanding the problem, you know, brainstorming the ideas, and then looking at the possible solutions and then trying them out, but also having the ability to iterate what you do. Right? And so with regards to the human part of it, when we were designing the processes of case to incident, we actually mapped out the different steps that a ticket would go through, understood what needed to be done in a quicker way, what needed to be done with more empathy, understood who is sitting behind each layer of that ticket, and how do we get it out the other side in a more, let's say, effective manner. Right?
Speaker 1:And so that's one part of it. And the other part of it is understanding that we're not dealing with machines, we're dealing with people. And just putting on blinders and saying, well, this is my process. I can't help you if you don't fit into my process. That was something we also kind of moved away from.
Speaker 1:So it's all well and good to have the processes and procedures, but it's also about designing for the circumstance and also empowering the agents to be able to make decisions to kind of deviate a little bit where they feel they need to in order to have the right outcome. And accountability is a big one on this. What we find in a typical service desk is that I take a ticket, I do my bid, and if I escalate, then that's where it ends for me because it's now gone to level two. But what we've done is we said, okay. First and foremost, whoever takes the ticket in level one, you own that.
Speaker 1:The ownership for the entire life cycle is yours. And what that means is that when they escalate to level two, they're still responsible to follow-up. Right? And the same way if level two escalate to level three, they still have that ownership to follow-up with level three because they're still gonna get follow ups from level one. So it's kind of having accountability.
Speaker 1:It's making sure that you kind of know that the person on the other end who opened that ticket opened it for a reason. They need your help. Otherwise, they wouldn't have opened a ticket. And so it's not just about following the process and then ignoring things. It's about making sure you come through and deliver.
Speaker 3:So one other topic I wanted to ask about. I understand that you have some key vendor relationships. Of course, the system that you use or that all of your agents use to to handle tickets and so on. Can you talk to me a bit about your vendor relationships? How do you think about those relationships as partnerships?
Speaker 3:How do those relationships help drive your work forward?
Speaker 1: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't procure a system from them, you know, we have people with them. And that makes it all the more tricky because, you know, you're not just dealing with a piece of software. You're dealing with human beings.
Speaker 1:And so that's one part. And to extend on that, ITC have kind of come into our model, which is what we like to do is work as a partner. And when we started off, there were a lot of elements that were new to both sides. And we walked in and we said, okay. We're committed to getting this done.
Speaker 1:We aligned on what the vision was. We aligned on what success looks like. And it was amazing to see that, you know, you come into this partnership, and they were willing to come to the table, admit when they made mistakes, also come to the table and tell us when we made mistakes. And, of course, both sides were happy to accept because the way the partnership was built was that we're not coming to the table to highlight mistakes because we wanna go after each other, whether it's commercially or blame or whatever, but it's to make each other better. And we have done this so many times.
Speaker 1:They have literally opened their doors to us and said, okay. Well, if you think we're not doing this in the right way, tell us. What would you like us to change? And so we have, you know, managed service agreements, which hold true. However, if we advise them to change certain elements of their managed service, they do so.
Speaker 1:And at the same time, if there are certain elements internally for us that are not working, they come to us and advise us and say, look, this particular bit that you have internally doesn't work, and we fix that. Because at the end of the day, it's the entire loop that we have together. We form a big part of it. They form a big part of it. But at the end, the recipient is the hotels.
Speaker 1:Right? And so this partnership model that we have, being open minded, and it works like this with a lot of the other partners we have. So including with HitGlobal, you know, we have the same sort of a model where everything is done together. A very big collaboration, understanding, you know, what are the common goals, what are the common metrics of success. And I think this is what has enabled us to be successful because we align on what will make us a success.
Speaker 1:The key point that needs to be understood is that from both sides, if a vendor has a strong conviction to drop you as a client, they can. And likewise, if a client has a strong conviction to drop you as a vendor or a supplier, they can. The only thing it means is that it's how long will it take and what is the impact of the business. And you can only imagine that if they make the decision to change, that means there was something bigger than the commercial impact that is going on that led to that decision. So I think both sides need to understand that anybody can choose to change.
Speaker 1:Nothing is a given. And what keeps you secure in that relationship is going forward with a common platform and a common, let's say, measurement of success.
Speaker 3:Well, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast. Thanks, Tariq.
Speaker 2:That's all for today's episode. Thanks for listening to Hotel Tech Insider produced by hoteltechreport.com. Our goal with this podcast is to show you how the best in the business are leveraging technology to grow their properties and outperform the concept by using innovative digital tools and strategies. I encourage all of our listeners to go try at least one of these strategies or tools that you learned from today's episode. Successful digital transformation is all about consistent small experiments over a long period of time, so don't wait until tomorrow to try something new.
Speaker 2:Do you know a hotelier who would be great to feature on this show, or do you think that your story would bring a lot of value to our audience? Reach out to me directly on LinkedIn by searching for Jordan Hollander. For more episodes like this, follow Hotel Tech Insider on all major streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.