Successful Onboarding At Thorpe Park, UK

Successful Onboarding For New Thorpe Park Employees With A Seppo Game

Thorpe Park Resort is one of the UK’s most thrilling theme parks, with over 30 rides, many events, and other attractions. Despite the pandemic, in 2020 Thorpe Park was the second most visited theme park in the UK. The park is only 32 km southwest of London, located in the village of Thorpe. The Park is operated by Merlin Entertainments.

Thorpe Park was looking for a tool to improve their onboarding process. After having had everything online during the pandemic, Thorpe Park didn’t want to move back to the classroom as it was before.  They were searching for a tool to combine face-to-face with online elements but also wanted to make sure to invest in something that could be used in the future.

Seppo was the tool that did everything they were looking for: Seppo allowed Thorpe Park to take out the classroom sections directly into the resort. While playing the Seppo game, people were interacting with each other and customers in a real-life context, as opposed to roleplaying in the classroom or learning about the park alone online.

“Seppo allowed us to bring face-to-face & online learning together. So keeping the online element for our compliance pieces and our info bits […] and then taking out the classroom sections and putting them into the resort so the new employees get to experience the park in real life, in real-time, with real people. The players live through the park visitor journey – so right from the very start of the park visit, all the way to the end. And really bring it to life,” explains Nathan Cook, learning & development business partner at Thorpe Park.

Seppo onboarding game improved the learning process and outcome for new Thorpe Park employees

Thorpe Park has been working together with Seppo to improve their onboarding process. Seppo was used to make an onboarding game, which then helped to increase the new employees’ knowledge about the resort and to help them understand the park’s products and services better.

The Seppo onboarding game has worked well for learning how to get around the resort. It supported learning how to best assist park visitors and how to interact with them. Using Seppo for onboarding has helped to improve new employees’ self-confidence about working in the resort and interacting with customers. At the same time, using the Seppo game led to a more successful onboarding process and improved the quality of customer service at Thorpe Park.

New employees love Seppo

People working at the resort are of all ages -– from teenagers to 70-year-olds. Gamification is a funny way to engage learners of all ages.

The new employees have reacted very positively toward the onboarding game:

“They are very keen. They are very engaged. They love everything about it! They love competition! You often find them wandering around the resort, shouting their top scores at each other, asking if anyone has beaten them yet. It just creates that whole new level of […] interaction and confidence at the resort. They love how confident they’ve become, as part of the game!” says Nathan cheerfully.

Using Seppo has a positive impact on many aspects of the park 

Thorpe Park has achieved the highest staff feedback and highest overall satisfaction, so far. Apart from the very positive feedback from new employees, using Seppo has also had a huge impact on the company itself. It has been the best start of the year in KPI’s up to now. Guests have been more satisfied than ever before: they have more trust and confidence in the park’s staff, and teams are more efficiently dealing with their problems. This can be traced back to an improvement in employees’ learning throughout onboarding: New employees are more confident, know the park better, know the resort offering better and they can find their way around.

Using Seppo has massively decreased the work of Nathan Cook, allowing him to focus on his other work while supporting the new employees throughout the onboarding process.

Great guidance and support provided by the Seppo team

When it comes to working together with Seppo, Nathan Cook finds the collaboration very fruitful:

“Seppo has been absolutely incredible! With their general openness and ability to listen and understand, the Seppo team provided great support and guidance throughout the process. The team helped generate ideas and bring them back to practicality, ensuring a great outcome. Thank you Seppo!” says Nathan happily.

Are you interested in the benefits of gamification for employee onboarding? Read more on our website: LINK