Accor | Cvent Transient CRM Integration
Introduction:
Accor is a French multinational hospitality company that owns, manages, and franchises hotels, resorts, and vacation properties. Accor is the largest hotel group in the world outside of the United States.
The worldwide hotel operator comprises of more than 5,100 hotels spanning 110 countries and 39 brands, from luxury to economy. Some of those brands include ibis, Sofitel, Orient Express and Raffles.
Accor and Cvent worked together to optimise Accor’s RFP management as well as introduce new tools and methods of revolutionising the way they work on a day-to-day basis, which would ultimately which allow them to strengthen their position as a world-leading hospitality brand. The group also recently launched its new lifestyle loyalty programme which is ALL - Accor Live Limitless.
The challenge:
Manual tasks such as transferring information from one platform to another can be a lengthy process, often amounting to hundreds of hours of work across multiple teams with a high margin for error.
Prior to using Cvent Transient (formerly Lanyon), Accor was using multiple contracting and RFP management tools, such as their own legacy tool which was interfaced with their CRM, Salesforce and distribution ecosystem. This set up made onboarding new hotels a long and painful process, caused lengthy delays from RFP acceptance to online distribution and made renegotiations difficult.
Having decided to switch to Cvent Transient, they surmised that for their teams to work most productively, the platform needed to be integrated with their CRM. The pandemic had made the RFP season more competitive, given that hotels are now fighting for a share of a smaller pie. They couldn’t afford to lose in the RFP process.
The solution:
Cvent worked with Accor to integrate Cvent Transient and Salesforce. This would enable the seamless, automatic transmission of information such as names, rates, cancellation, commission etc.
To begin with, Cvent scoped Accors needs in remote meetings where they explored what Accor needed, what they wanted to achieve and agreed on what the project was going to look like. What followed was a three-day discovery workshop in Paris and Dallas.
“This was really helpful to unlock some key points, and despite the time difference, the overall process was really smooth.” said Severine Zucher, Project Manager at Accor. “I would say Accor has the business expertise and Cvent is just an enabler of those ambitions from a technical point of view.”
The benefits:
With the amount of data that Accor handles on a daily basis, this integration is integral to save time and prevent human error.
The CRM integration handles all of it so that the manual transfer of information is now redundant and within seconds Accor’s sales teams find the data at their fingertips. “Imagine that you have an RFP coming into Transient,” says Zucher. “Automatically it flies into our Salesforce CRM where it attaches to the right account and then afterwards to the right contact.”
But it’s not just the high-level RFP details which can be transferred: “You've got the prices, black-out days, you’ve got fair rates, meal plans and more.”
Despite the challenging RFP season just passed, Accor relay that they are happy with what they have achieved so far with the integration, that the solution is robust and reliable.
“It’s powerful, it’s useful, it’s reliable,” says Zucher. “And I have to say it’s actually thanks to the efforts of the Cvent technical and product teams and to the efforts of the Accor technical and training teams.”
One of the key ways the integration has helped their teams day-to-day and in the long run is by providing the capability to monitor hotels’ statuses from different perspectives such as contracting status and CRS loading status.
They also report that their monitoring on and reporting of the RFP process has been simplified which saves time and money.
Accor can now seamlessly monitor their RFP and distribution performance in order to provide excellent service to their users and clients.
“We can now deliver operational excellence to our hotel operators and to our owners,” Zucher said. “And this will definitely power our development ambitions.” Because of the CRM intergration, Accor recently completed the integration of Mövenpick Hotels & Resorts, who were Cvent users before Accor aquired them.
“Having this fully integrated experience resulted in a smooth and successful integration of Mövenpick Hotels & Resorts.”
