Background
Accor, a European leader in hospitality, operates over 5,500 properties across 110 countries with more than 300,000 employees. The company manages a diverse portfolio of hotels, ranging from ultra-luxury to economy brands, aiming to define future hospitality trends.
The Challenge
The Accor Global Sales team is a very large, dynamic organization in charge of the B2B clients, corporations, and travel agencies. In 2016, the company took on an initiative to digitize its business workflows and documentation, including quotes, proposals, and contracts. At the time, Accor was managing a multitude of document templates across thousands of properties and several global brands, hotels, and languages.
Each template contained different information, from hotel logos to various room types and from location to season-based pricing. Manually generating these meeting & events proposals and contracts for meeting rooms, conventions, seminars, and dinners was laborious. In the hospitality industry this is a challenge because requests are time-sensitive and the first company to respond to a proposal is the most likely to win the contract. Accor needed to be the first to submit a proposal, as often as possible.
“We've got a worldwide implementation with several brands which support several templates per brand, per language, so we needed to find a solution that could answer the salespeople’s needs.”
“On the cost and contracting side…it's not only a quote with one or two hotels,” explains Vincent Gerard, Sales Engagement Director at Accor. “It can be 300, 400, 500 hotels within a deal, meaning that we have a lot of products in the quote, a lot of lines with a lot of rates, each hotel with two to three room types, and maybe four to five seasons in the pricing.”
“We've got a worldwide implementation with several brands which support several templates per brand, per language,” says Laurent LeFort, Tribe Tech Lead Business Travel, Leisure, Groups & Sales Digital Operations at Accor. “So we needed to find a solution that could answer the salespeople’s needs.”
Accor began this process by selecting and implementing Salesforce for both the B2B and B2C segments of the business. Along with Salesforce, it chose to implement S-Docs as its document automation solution.
“S-Docs is serving our ambitions: Driving very qualitative, reliable, and professional relations with our main key accounts and also serving our 5500+ hotels that need to send quotes to clients who wish to have a seminar, a dinner, or meeting.”
The Solution
Accor chose S-Docs over other solutions due to its native integration with Salesforce, simple and intuitive interface, and highly customizable template builder that offers significant flexibility across the business.
With S-Docs, Accor is able to automatically generate quotes and contracts populated with data from Salesforce, ensuring that each document is customized by location, hotel brand, language, and more — all without extensive external support. “It's just straight to the point, very clear, very simple,” says Gerard.
The group considered other solutions but found them to be far more complex, with additional investments required in order to bring in partners to manage the complexity.
The S-Docs features Accor found most valuable include:
- One-button document creation
- Accessible and highly customizable templates
- Dynamic data population from Salesforce
- Simple, intuitive interface
- Salesforce-native architecture
Of S-Docs, Gerard says, “Everything is integrated. It's just a click, and the document is available.”
The Impact
One of the biggest wins from Accor’s S-Docs implementation is the time savings across the sales teams. Once upon a time, it took several hours to generate a quote — now, they can quickly generate documents without having to copy and paste information from another system. In just one click, the document is available.
In addition, they’ve been able to predictably deliver thousands upon thousands of professional documents to the market — and every customer receives a fully branded, clean, and visually consistent proposal from Accor. Since the company owns more than 40 hotel brands, this has brought significant peace of mind to management knowing that the right, up-to-date logo and pricing will always be placed on the right document. This enhanced accuracy has also significantly improved their customers’ experience.
The templates themselves are very versatile and easy to adjust on the fly, particularly when it comes to pricing formats or market fluctuations. This flexibility enables the sales team to react quickly to market trends, rather than waiting weeks for a new template. “S-Docs is serving our ambitions: Driving very qualitative, reliable, and professional relations with our main key accounts and also serving our 5500+ hotels that need to send quotes to clients who wish to have a seminar, a dinner, or meeting,” says Gerard.
The seamless integration with Salesforce enables real-time data exchange, enhancing the capture of opportunities and further streamlining the document generation process.
Looking Ahead
Accor is a forward-thinking company in a fast-moving industry. As the company grows and morphs with market changes, leadership plans to continue evolving their use of S-Docs. The aim is to leverage S-Docs for even greater automation and efficiency, ensuring Accor remains at the forefront of hospitality innovation.
