© HEI Hotels & Resorts / Merritt Hospitality LLC
Project Summary:
Target audience: mid- to senior-level Operations leadership across 75 hotels
Tools used: PowerPoint, Audacity, Photoshop, Microsoft Excel, Brainshark
My responsibilities:
- Stakeholder management: initial needs analysis and SME interviews, provided weekly updates on progress to CEO, solicited multiple stages of feedback, drove approvals from multiple SMEs
- E-Learning design and development: wrote video script, animated video using PowerPoint and Brainshark, recorded/edited voiceover audio, created assessment, iterated based on stakeholder feedback as necessary
- Implementation: create and upload SCORM to Learning Management System; assign to relevant role-specific curricula; monitor completion rates in 30, 60, and 90 day increments; created storyboards to facilitate sustainable improvements in the future
Result: brief supplementary video intended to increase Guest Satisfaction scores until full training program could be developed and released.
Creating Change Quickly
Task: guest experience scores at HEI hotels put some properties in danger of missing contractual obligations
HEI hotels are contractually obliged to maintain certain levels of guest satisfaction that correspond with brand standards. While many of our hotels had stellar satisfaction ratings, a sizable percentage were lagging far below brand standards.
We set out to determine what contributed most profoundly to high scores at leading hotels, and found that, across the board, there were six areas that had the most material impact on overall satisfaction scores. These same six metrics were areas in which struggling hotels scored poorly. Additionally, when hotels were empowered to make common-sense improvements in these areas, guest satisfaction soared.
Solution: increase guest satisfaction by teaching teams how to succeed in the most impactful areas of the customer experience
Mastering these six elements was not enough to guarantee excellence in guest satisfaction across our whole portfolio; that would require a mountain of strategy development and business process management. However, improvements in these areas would allow our lowest-performing hotels to quickly make small changes that would have an immediate impact on their guest satisfaction scores.
For one of my first solo projects on the training team, I was tasked with:
- Connecting with SMEs for strategy guidance
- Writing the scripts and assessment
- Pushing materials through the stakeholder approval process
- Recording and editing the voiceover
- Creating storyboards post-launch to help with future updates
- And designing, developing, and distributing the course to employees.
Result: a quick, clear training video with actionable insight on how to improve the guest experience
At a point where the team frequently had 90-day turnarounds between initial research and training program delivery, this series went from initial concept to circulation within 3 weeks.
The Final Product
Storyboarding for Success
Click on any of the thumbnails below to zoom, or use the text link below to download the full PDF for better readability.
Download Full PDFWhat I Learned
- Basic storyboarding for e-Learning: while these storyboards were meant as an internal tool and do not have the polish I would typically strive for, they were also the first time anyone on the team had utilized storyboarding for our e-Learning projects. I enjoyed learning the process and defining how our team should approach it.
- Complex animation in PowerPoint - the "vignettes" I created for this program were more advanced than any of my peers had worked on previously. I was able to teach them my approach for creating these, and also saved them as templates so the scenes could be reused in future projects.
