AccorHotels and the Digital Transformation

Digital disruption is a change when new technologies and models affect the existing products or services value and could be more challenging. If any organization has an attitude like 'wait and see' then they are risking getting behind in the market (Hill, 2017). In today's digital era, organizations need to create strategies to overcome the challenges in order to stay competitive. The challenges that most organizations face are as follows (Tiersky, 2017):

1. Resistance to change, that makes organizations behind their digital competitors
2. No clear vision for digital customer journey
3. Ineffective ways of collecting and using customer data
4. Using inflexible technology stack and development processes
5. Tied to the legacy model of business

AccorHotels uses offline marketing activities. As a senior executive, planning to integrate an online digital presence, I will make sure the above challenges addressed appropriately. Empowering consumers is the key to business success.

Similarly, the transformation of information access like prices, destinations, alternative ways of accommodation and user reviews to consumers is also key to the success of the organization. As a first step, understand the classification of online content, what content creates value and what does not (Dubois et al., 2016). Looking at the various stages, a consumer navigates come up with the list of what is adequate for most of them. Then align the organization teams to embrace the change and integrate into their day to day work (Dubois et al., 2016). Introduce digital intelligence to listen to what consumers have to say and focus on the collected content to bring most of the ROI and business operations (Dubois, 2017). Foster digital content production and dissemination into all the platforms across the organization.

Design Changes:

AccorHotels has a diverse group of operations ranging from 4000 hotels in 95 countries and from luxury to budget, and the design for digital transformation has to identify various types of online content so that the digital solution provides consumers with easy journey in the various stages like right places to visit, stay and have good experience about their stay (Dubois, 2017). Designing and developing a social media listening (SML), an alerting system that alerts organization on other conversation across different social media sites and carefully reviewing the customer's feedback on comments, compliments and complaints will provide with much information in the further improving the digital operations.

Leveraging the content:

The collection of information via customer reviews from various subsets of social media widely shared across organization functions like strategy, marketing, HR and finance. The information could be used to improve the operational services, provide better hospitality and provide with deals and incentives.

Roles needed:

AccorHotels has to create a dedicated team of members to gather and segregate the information into various categories on customer reviews about their stay in their hotels and general review discussions about other hotels from the designed system which search through all the major social media sites and blogs. Also, a dedicated to generating good conveying images, photos etc. about the customer's destinations and choices and share them across organization functions and engage and encourage them in their day to day duties. Finally, a dedicated to monitoring the content changes accordingly to the customer's needs and tastes through an internally developed alerting system.

Aspects to maximize value creation through digital and social media:

According to (Akter et al., 2016), the aspects to maximize value creation for an organization through digital and social media were as follows:

Customer Engagement: engaging customers in promoting brand and customer service representative activities for donating to a national cause

Improving services: Improve existing services based on customer inputs and feedback

Crisis Management: Take seriously on the customer complaints and strategize proactively to take necessary actions before they become widespread problems

Social media has proven to be the perfect field to showcase new products or to get customer feedback from existing or newly launched products. When the information gathered from social media is used to brew meaningful insights and develop actionable strategies, organizations could generate excellent business value.

References:

Hill, J. (2017). Leading Through Digital Disruption. [online] Gartner.com. Available at: https://www.gartner.com/imagesrv/books/digital-disruption/pdf/digital_disruption_ebook.pdf [Accessed 31 Jan. 2019].

Tiersky, H. (2017). 5 top challenges to digital transformation in the enterprise. [online] CIO. Available at: https://www.cio.com/article/3179607/e-commerce/5-top-challenges-to-digital-transformation-in-the-enterprise.html [Accessed 31 Jan. 2019].

Dubois, D., Chae, Y., Niessing, J. and Wee, J. (2016). AccordHotels and the Digital Transformation. [online] Services.hbsp.harvard.edu. Available at: https://services.hbsp.harvard.edu/api/courses/411589/items/IN1251-PDF-ENG/sclinks/84623b42e28bbcb7e4fff0364cf7f692 [Accessed 31 Jan. 2019].

Dubois, D. (2017). Lessons in Digital Transformation from the Hotel Industry. [online] INSEAD Knowledge. Available at: https://knowledge.insead.edu/marketing/lessons-in-digital-transformation-from-the-hotel-industry-5123 [Accessed 31 Jan. 2019].

Akter, S., Bhattacharyya, M., Wamba, S. and Aditya, S. (2016). How does Social Media Analytics Create Value?. Journal of Organizational and End User Computing, 28(3), pp.1-9.

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