Success story: Merlin Entertainments

Headquartered in the UK, Merlin Entertainments is a global leader in location-based family entertainment and one of the world’s largest attraction operators.

With well-known brands like LEGOLAND and SEA LIFE Centres, and theme parks such as Alton Towers and Thorpe Park, it runs 130 different entertainment venues in 25 countries.

Following the first COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020, Merlin had to include training in its reopening plans, not only for permanent staff but also for its many seasonal workers.

Key messages were included in the company’s COVID-19 response courses but with such a widespread workforce, Merlin’s Group Learning and Development team had no way of checking that the training had been successful and had been assimilated by the workforce.  

Merlin Entertainments wanted a solution that would enable it to reinforce training for matters of group-wide importance and to evaluate what employees had taken from that training.  
Its aims were to:

• Improve efficiency and engagement and move away from classroom learning
• Take account of the fact that user expectations varied between attractions and countries
• Use a tool that would rely on repetition to underline the messages that mattered most
• Impart knowledge that could be passed on to impact the end-customer experience
• Support the ‘Staff Friendly and Helpful’ KPI which is an important Merlin Entertainments aim

Discover how gamified learning can improve employee engagement in learning.

Merlin researched how gameplay could help reinforce knowledge and decided that Gamebrain was the ideal solution. Part of the Access Learning Management System, Gamebrain is a mobile app that enables users to learn through a fun, gameshow-style experience. Competitive, bite-sized quizzes can be quickly created on any topic to add a gamified layer to more traditional learning or can be selected from a growing access library of topics.

Employees are drawn into the solution by creating their own personalised avatar and taking on their virtual colleagues, and a special Merlin avatar was created in line with company branding. Challenges are hosted by branded avatars of key staff, encouraging play across all levels of the organisation.

See our software in action to experience all the functionality of Gamebrain.

Using Gamebrain during a pilot phase has been such a resounding success that Merlin is now going to ‘go global’, implementing it throughout the whole organisation.

Although staff quickly learnt all the right answers, wanting to record the quickest time was so intense that, on average, employees played the game at least eight times, significantly increasing their learning levels.

This level of engagement reinforces training and gives Merlin a barometer for measuring the success of its knowledge retention. For the initial COVID-19 quiz, 6,000 people took part from Merlin attractions as far apart as New York, Dubai, UK, Netherlands, Australia and USA.

Merlin is now looking to use a new QI code feature for quicker sign-on and to enable different attractions to create its own branded games.

Gamebrain became Merlin’s most popular learning solution when it was launched, with the single quiz accounting for 36% of all online learning activity.

“I have never encountered any learning experience that people want to do over and over again, even though it’s voluntary. It shows the power of game mechanics,” concludes Tom Fowler, Senior Instructional Designer of Group Learning & Development at Merlin Entertainments.

The Access Group's HCM division, Access People, offer an unrivalled suite of solutions for businesses, including HR and Payroll, Absence Management, Workforce Management, Compliance, Recruitment, Talent, Learning, Employee Benefits and Engagement, Health & Safety, all of which are underpinned by the powerful Access Workspace platform. 

The Access Group is one of the leading providers of business management software to small and mid-sized organisations in the UK, Ireland, and Asia Pacific. We help over 100,000 customers across commercial and not-for-profit sectors become more productive and efficient.