6 mins
How tech companies and corporates can set a pilot programme up for success
For both tech companies and corporates, conducting a tech pilot can be extremely beneficial. Corporates get to test out the potential impact that emerging technology could have on their business with the help of experts. Meanwhile, for tech companies, it provides an opportunity to gain insights into how a customer will use their product (and could potentially result in a long term partnership).
However, as both entities operate in very different ways, “culture clash” can often hinder the success of a pilot.
At Tcube, we have helped a number of industry partners and tech companies across the tourism sector plan, execute, and assess the potential of these programs. We spoke with two mentors from the Singapore Tourism Accelerator and one STB industry partner to find out what both parties can do to set a tech pilot up for success.
Ankit Airon, Hotel Manager at Intercontinental Singapore
With 22 years of experience in the hospitality industry, Airon started mentoring STA cohorts four years ago providing insights into how hotels work, how they think, and how decisions are made. Talking about KPIs and ROI has been a major part of every conversation.
Vikas Bhola, former APAC regional director for Booking.com and current Co-Founder & CEO of startup NeoKe
Bhola’s main focus as an STA mentor has been on how startups can transition from running a pilot, or a POC, to a commercial agreement. In addition to this, he advises founders 1:1 on a variety of topics from pricing strategies to how to craft out commercial modelling and product.
Khang Nguyen Trieu, Accor Group Chief Technology Architect
Khang has been working in technology for over 20 years in France and then in Singapore since 2016, in digital native companies and more traditional companies going for digital transformation. In 2020, he joined Accor as Chief Information Officer for Asia Pacific, a role he held until he was promoted to a position of Group Chief Technology Architect in 2021. He is a promoter of “Tech for Good” both in his daily job and outside.
Tips for tech companies
Conducting a pilot with a large and influential corporate within the industry can really be the break your tech company needs to access funding, gain key network opportunities/exposure, and grow your business.
So what are some things you can do to really make this partnership shine from the outset?
Tip 1: Focus on listening and understanding first
One of the biggest divides Ankit Airon, Hotel Manager at Intercontinental Singapore, sees is that the operations and processes within the hospitality industry — and each individual hotel for that matter — are really alien to tech companies that are used to processes within the tech world. This disconnect means it’s extremely difficult to meet all of a hotel’s needs, but Airon shared one best practice that he sees successful tech companies doing:
“They need to understand the business process first. Everybody comes with a solution assuming that you have a certain problem. I think the technology companies that are actually spending time to understand how the operations and processes work are building that capability of, not only resolving the problem for one customer, but for the industry at large.”
Tip 2: Transparent and continuous communication is key
“Founders are very busy fixing the pilot and running it. But there’s often a dead silence after it’s done,” says Vikas Bhola, former APAC regional director for Booking.com and current Co-Founder & CEO of startup NeoKe.
Having open, continuous, and transparent communication between the tech company and corporate decision-maker throughout a pilot is key. Don’t just offer a product, offer your expertise in the field and a willingness to collaborate on iterations. Following up with a review and feedback session immediately after the pilot ends will also help keep your product and offering top of mind.
“If something's going well, explain why it's going well. If something's not going well, talk about why it's not going well and what could be the possible outcome. Corporates are looking for insights with these pilots.”
Corporates may want to have this technology and the skills needed to develop it internally, but it’s very costly and a much longer process to develop a product in-house. So, if the founders have the expertise they need, whether the product is there yet or not, it’ll be in their interest to help make it successful, rather than starting from scratch.
Tip 3: Use the pilot to test out your pricing model
While it may be tempting to entice a corporate with a free trial of your product, in Bhola’s opinion, this is a mistake. Instead, he believes tech pilots are a great testing ground for your product’s pricing model. Negotiating the price at this stage will give you key insights into what corporates might be willing to pay for a product such as yours.
“I have seen more often than not that tech companies are making these trade-offs. When a corporate comes out of a pilot, the willingness to pay for a product is very low, even though they’ve already been onboarded. So test your pricing hypothesis before you even run the pilot. This will allow you to resource better and calculate the lifetime value of your product.”
Tips for corporates
Accor is a hospitality management group operating around 5,000 hotels across the world. As Chief Technology Architect, Khang Nguyen Trieu is in charge of Accor’s long and mid-term technology strategy.
One particular pain point Nguyen wanted to explore was how they could boost their housekeeping capacity. His team is now conducting a pilot project in collaboration with Tcube with the overall goal being to improve housekeeping productivity by 50%. Nguyen shared three key learnings he’s gained so far:
- Identify one key pain point to focus on
There is never just one challenge you want to address, so the problem will always be deciding what to focus on first. When Nguyen and his team first decided to conduct a tech pilot, they were considering two very different issues: how to save time on housekeeping and how to cut wait times at breakfast.
Nguyen’s solution was to involve the hotel operations team in the discussion from the beginning. This helped Nguyen and his team zero in on the pain point that would have the biggest potential for impact.
“Involve the people who have the expertise so that you are really close to the challenge you want to solve,” he says.
This will help provide the key insights you need to really understand the problem. What’s more, coming up with a solution together will help gain buy-in within the team.
- Develop clear and measurable KPIs from the outset
During the planning phase, they identified three very clear KPIs, including the time it takes to clean a room, how many rooms a housekeeper can do before vs during the experiment, etc.
“If you don't have this kind of data, decisions will be made based on gut feeling by people who may be more or less convinced but that’s not efficient. Today we operate 30 hotels in Singapore across all the segments, from economy to midscale to luxury to lifestyle. This makes Singapore a perfect testbed for innovation and will help us accelerate adoption across the different segments. This will give us a kind of playbook with real data that we can then use to scale adoption across our global network.”
- Keep in regular contact with all stakeholders involved
“During the whole process, we had daily follow ups on the experiment. We had a very regular point of contact with our product, operations, and hotel management teams as well so that everybody was onboard.
When it comes to innovation, getting buy-in from different stakeholders is key because sometimes you see companies which tend to keep innovation siloed within one team. They may come up with some good ideas but, if the teams which are actually implementing and using the new technology don’t feel they have ownership over these ideas, you won’t get the buy-in you need to make it successful.”
Singapore Tourism Accelerator is open for applications!
Is your business looking for that key opportunity to prove itself as a disruptor within the tourism sector?
Singapore Tourism Board’s Accelerator programme is back again and accepting applications for cohort 7 through 5 June 2023. Apply for your chance to gain invaluable insights from our experienced mentors, and make connections with industry partners who are looking for a product like yours to help them accelerate their business. Since its inception in 2019, the programme has:
- received more than 900 tech applications from 50 countries
- supported 53 tech companies to develop 58 industry solutions
If you are an industry stakeholders who is interested in conducting a guided pilot with STB and one of our promising new cohort companies, reach out to us via the Tcube interest form: https://go.gov.sg/tcubecommunity
For more information about the synthesised industry challenge areas for cohort 7, you may refer here for more details.