 |
CAREER – KIM RICHARD, CO-FOUNDER OF MAKE ME GLOW: "DEVELOPING TEAMS STEP BY STEP, BUT IN A SUSTAINABLE AND MEASURABLE WAY" (France)
Make Me Glow is reinventing skills development and offers an immersive digital suite that puts people at the heart of hotel performance, combining onboarding, continuous training and conversational AI. |
Catégorie : Europe - France - Carrières
- Interviews et portraits
- Carrière - Interviews
Interview de Vanessa Guerrier-Buisine le mercredi 01 octobre 2025
 Kim Richard and Alexandra Prigent, cofounders of Make Me Glow
Crédit photo © Make Me Glow
In January 2022, this shared vision and their complementary skills gave rise to Make Me Glow, an innovative digital suite that supports hotels in developing the skills of their teams. Their ambition: to put people back at the heart of performance, with a solution designed for the field, combining structured onboarding, continuous training and mystery interventions, for continuous, fluid learning that is, above all, rooted in the reality of the profession. The result is an immersive and interactive platform, designed as a real-life coach, enriched by conversational AI, training capsules, and mystery interventions that nurture concrete learning connected to reality.
The two women are convinced that the future of hospitality will involve personalised, engaging and measurable support. Combining technology, playful storytelling and human support, Make Me Glow offers a new way of learning, managing and, above all, making talent shine. In an interview with Journal des Palaces, Kim Richard discusses all the ingredients that contribute to the success of their solution and illustrates its relevance for professionals in the hotel industry.
Journal des Palaces: Could you tell us about your respective backgrounds that led you to found Make Me Glow?
Kim Richard: After studying in the hotel industry, we both took jobs in reception before moving on to hotel management positions.
We created Make Me Glow in January 2022, having worked closely together since January 2013.
We both faced the same frustration: recruiting people with little or no experience, then successfully integrating and training them effectively. For several years, we had noticed that an essential link was missing and that this process needed to be changed.
Managers, who are already very busy, no longer have the time or the right tools to provide long-term support for their teams' skills development. Existing solutions are fragmented and insufficient.
Seeing the quality of service decline, even though it is the DNA of our industry, prompted us to transform learning in the hotel industry. We drew inspiration from practices in other industries to devise a more effective and engaging methodology.
For me, taking pleasure in making others happy is fundamental to the hotel industry. However, this obvious fact is tending to fade today due to a lack of transmission, standards, time, and resources.
What solutions do you offer hotels?
Make Me Glow is the only digital solution suite that addresses both HR challenges and business issues in the hotel industry.
In concrete terms, we have a digital platform that integrates a coherent triptych - mystery shopping, onboarding and continuous training - which transforms the employee experience for the benefit of the guest experience.
Our mission is to reconcile the promise of hotels with the actual experience of guests, which is currently very different, through a targeted, immersive and engaging training solution. All this while making our professions easily accessible to all profiles, without compromising on the quality of service or the performance of the property.
How do you differentiate yourself from the many existing training offers?
There are some excellent training programmes available today, which we ourselves have used and appreciated during our years in hotel management.
What sets us apart is our comprehensive, immersive and continuous approach, which consolidates recruitment, boosts employee engagement and supports their progress. We place employees in a participatory role in order to promote active learning and rapid knowledge retention.
We have also opted for a digital approach to simplify the management of skills development and enable both HR and managers to monitor the individual and collective progress of their teams in real time.
In addition, we work closely with management and teams on a regular basis, providing real support for the challenges they face in the field.
How have you integrated AI into your offering?
Our major differentiating factor is the integration of conversational AI, not to create content, but to offer teams a way to practise interacting better with their guests.
They can practise sales, dissatisfaction management, and guest relations before, during and after the stay, for all hotel services, as well as a solution for managers.
This AI, driven by our expertise, acts as a coach: it provides immediate and personalised feedback, thereby stimulating progress. Here, mistakes are an opportunity for progress and do not impact the hotel's image.
We wanted to go further by creating a virtual hotel run by a fictional but endearing team, which each employee encounters throughout their career.
This engaging narrative creates collective motivation: everyone feels involved in an adventure, with a role to play that is easy to understand and embody.
How do mystery interventions serve to engage teams?
At Make Me Glow, we believe that employee engagement is not a goal in itself, but a state of mind. It cannot be imposed: it must be stimulated, encouraged and supported in order for teams to grow. It is with this in mind that we have combined our mystery interventions with our continuous training solution.
Teams are trained through real interactions taken from our actual interventions.
Our mystery interventions allow us to highlight the key touchpoints in the guest journey, moments that are often invisible to hoteliers but which directly influence the guest experience and turnover.
We thus become a true ally of hotels, sustainably strengthening the relational and commercial posture of their teams.
Finally, our solution helps to strengthen the employer brand by providing teams with a tool for integration and continuous training.
How long does Make Me Glow support last?
We are very clear with hoteliers: you don't go from 0 to 100% success in the short term; Make Me Glow support is a long-term commitment.
It is based on progressive scenarios and concrete action plans resulting from our mystery shopping, but also on the regular creation of new training content and training capsules integrated into the integration process.
Just as hoteliers today need a CRM or RMS, our solution is integrated into the daily management of hotels: it is a real skills management tool, designed to help teams evolve step by step, but in a sustainable and measurable way.
Carrying out mystery guest visits on an ad hoc basis without an action plan behind them is counterproductive, as is failing to measure the acquisition of new skills.
We wanted to create an ROI-focused tool that capitalises on one of a hotel's main resources: its people.
How does negative feedback become a tool for improving the guest experience?
Through regular and constant support, both for hotel management and teams, we create a real space for exchange and progress. Our collective feedback sessions enable us to identify, together with the teams, the sticking points and uncomfortable situations encountered in the guest journey.
We quickly realised that employees are often fully aware of what is wrong with their interactions. They recognise their mistakes... but don't always know how to improve. That's why we transform these areas for improvement into practical case studies integrated into our training solution so that they can practise in a supportive environment, without stress or fear of judgement.
By also giving them a participatory role in supporting the fictional young apprentice, a character in our virtual hotel, we help them gain confidence, practise and improve, supported by our regular feedback.
What are Make Me Glow's plans? Are you considering rolling out your offering in English?
Make Me Glow has big plans, and developing our platform in English is one of them. Our training solution is already available in several languages, so all we need to do now is find the right testing ground for beta testing our solution.
 The Glow Hotel is the virtual hotel created by Make Me Glow to support the development of team skills
Crédit photo © Make Me Glow
|
|
