National Amusement Park
The Challenge
Onboarding 40,000 seasonal employees
Every year, this national amusement park group prepares for a summer season of thrilling rides, concessions, entertainment, and hundreds of thousands of customers. This park prepares for those demands by onboarding 30 to 40,000 seasonal employees every year. Many of those employees need to be trained on how to use the park’s point-of-sale (POS) systems to provide customers with a seamless purchasing experience park-wide.
The park’s in-person training program had reached a limit. The program used real registers to train new employees. Each register individually cost $3,000, making the training extremely expensive and difficult to scale. The in-person program could not simulate real transactions with customers. New employees could learn what buttons to push on the register, but could not experience the stress of a line stretching around the corner or a customer who needed to change his order at the last second.
The park needed a scalable, interactive training program to effectively and efficiently onboard its seasonal team.
Roundtable's Solution
An augmented reality POS scenario training
Partnering with Roundtable Learning, the park developed an AR experience that would allow new employees to interact with virtual customers and test their cash handling acumen under simulated stress. The immersive training helped new employees understand the types of scenarios they could experience while on-the-job. Trainees were given a better way to retain and recall common transaction processes, which will, overall, reduce the cost of retraining over time.
It also cut training costs for the park, as learners could take the training on tablets rather than expensive cash registers. We designed the training to be an exact replica of the park’s POS system, which allowed the park to disperse training more easily and portably.
The Results
Expanding the reach of training
The park deployed the AR training for its 2019 season and it has had an immediate impact.
“The implementation of our new system has already made a positive impact for our team members, our guests, and [the company] as a whole. By providing realistic transaction scenarios, our team receives an opportunity to develop their guest interaction skills. This efficiency carries over first-hand to our training team, who are more able to demonstrate the transaction process, as well as our guests, who receive a second-to-none service experience.”
Thanks to training administered on tablets rather than registers, the park has been able to decrease training costs. Employers and trainees have enjoyed the portability of training outside of the classroom and have seen initial success with improved retention and recall strategies.