Select Page

So you walk into a hotel, you’re in the queue, and it’s taking ages to check-in. Or at breakfast, there’s no milk on the table…. it’s all those little things that matter in the hospitality trade. In the age of TripAdvisor, it matters. Jury’s Inn take this seriously by training their staff to a set of defined, exacting standards.

Agile AI solution

This means agile training – relentless attention to training and the behaviour of customer facing staff. By agile they mean the use of AI to create training quickly, that really does deliver high retention training to front-line staff on any device. WildFire, an AI online content creation service, quickly turned a set of 209 standards, into 6 online learning modules on:
General standards
Front office
Room service
Each module focused on essential knowledge – what staff need to know.

Agile learning
Every module has an AI generated audio introduction (text to speech), that explains what you have to do and to relax about getting things wrong, as it is OK to make mistakes while learning. Staff then read the standards and, rather than click on multiple-choice questions, have to bring to mind and type in the behavioural standards. This ‘effortful’ learning was inspired by recent research in learning that shows recall, with open input, is superior for retention to simply recognising answers from a list.

Agile production
The six modules were literally created in a day, as the AI created the content, by identifying the relevant learning points and automatically creating the learning experiences. This superfast production process meant that quality assurance could be done on the real modules, without the need for design documents and scripts. There was no need for multiple iterations by SMEs, as the original document contained all the necessary knowledge. The look and feel, logo, images, palette numbers for screen features were quickly agreed. Everything from brief to final delivery was done through Skype. Not a single face-to-face meeting was necessary.

Agile data
Finally, the modules were SCORM wrapped for delivery on the LMS – Totara. As SCORM is rather limited, we also embedded extra data gathering capability which WildFire harvests for further analysis. This allows detailed analysis of who did what when and within the training, the specific times taken by each individual. Beyond this. WildFire have been looking at data and correlating it with other data on sales.

Agile preparation

Agile project management
Another essential ingredient is an agile project manager. In both the Jury’s Inn and TUI projects, we spoke frequently, but didn’t have a single face-to-face meeting. It was all quick decisions, problems solvedon the spot and process change to get things done. The project managers never saw problems, only issues to be solved – quickly.

Agile production

Agile promotion
I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve bust a gasket getting something finished, only to see it languish on a server before release. Agile marketing should also be part of our mindset. This means blogs like this and good internal (and external if required`) marketing. Managers and learners are intrigued by the use of AI in learning – use that to best advantage.
