Accor Hotels

Digital workforce development across 94 countries

A mobile learning experience for 250,000 employees

Intro & problem

Accor Group are global industry heavyweights with 20 brands, 4,100 hotels and 250,000 employees around the world. The company’s mission to build and sustain the best standards in hospitality powered by the many courses, academies and training programs made available to their workforce.

As the group’s global digital presence grows, Accor need to find ways of sharing valuable information related to their online environments with their entire global workforce, in all different languages. The company needs to guarantee consistency across all digital experiences through one robust channel that’s not only full of great content but is also engaging, fun to use and interactive. We grouped all of these requirements into a product we call Digit’all — The first mobile-first product within Accor Global, a gamified learning experience that trains employees across 94 countries.

Campaign approach for content

Digit’all is a company wide course on Accor Group’s digital initiatives. The learning content is designed to trickle in episodes so not to inundate employees with information in a short period of time. The content was grouped up into batches and set to be released on a week by week scheduled. With each release, users receive an email newsletter and a set of content they can view. Following each lesson, users can complete a quiz to assess their understanding of the latest module. Every time a user finished a quiz and answers questions correctly, points are awarded and their position on the leaderboard is updated.

Easy to create an upload

Every aspect of Digit’all is managed by a powerful CMS. Trainers log in every week to create a new module, populate it with videos, audio, images and text and set it to be released on a schedule. The training team at Accor Group can manage and grow the experience in the long term without any input from ourselves or their technical staff. This has made Accor quick to create training campaigns and analyse team performance for timely corrective action.

Gamification: Quizzes, Badges and Leaderboards

Gamification is a great way to motivate employees in a learning experience. With adequate insight into their colleague’s performance, users typically become interested in completing courses and taking tests in order to demonstrate their knowledge and climb up leaderboards, potentially past competing colleagues. This healthy competition is desirable in any learning experience, and helps companies maintain a great level of engagement around the new software they’ve built for their teams. Thanks to quirky badges that users can unlock as their performance improves, we’ve cultivated a buzzing atmosphere within Digit’all that keeps the workforce logging in for the next session.

Integration with existing company platforms

A challenge with any new company-wide software is engagement. How does Accor Group motivate it’s tens of thousands of employees to create a new account and use another set of access credentials? We solved this by integrating Digit’all with existing company platforms, in this case with Yammer. Yammer is used by the majority of employees within Accor Group and across all departments. Simply by allowing users to use their existing credentials (similar to signing up to services using Facebook or Twitter), we found that registered users went up and continue to use the system regularly. By using a combination of newsletters and in-Yammer campaigns, most of the Accor Group workforce remains fully aware of Digit’all and its latest learning content.

Multiple languages

Offering a learning experience to each and every employee of a global company reveals a fair share of challenges — what we had to get right from day one was multiple language support. Digit’all now supports 7 languages. Uploading the various translations (for content and the product’s user interface) became easily possible thanks to the content management system (CMS) which was intentionally designed to take in multiple languages, characters and various iterations of content which differ from one country to the next.

Used in 94 countries

1. Supports 250,000 Users
2. App is protagonist of ‘Digit’all days’. A workshop initiative in which employees discuss the learning materials from various countries around the world.
3. First ever internal campaign focussed on digital learning on a global level