ShiftOne:

With great legacy comes great challenge, though: rapidly-proliferating competition, an increasingly youthful workforce, and static guest check averages prompted leadership to double down on culture and brainstorm sales-boosting strategies for cornerstone high-margin items.

Challenge: A missed upsell opportunity is akin to leaving money on the table, and team members who struggle with sales best practices can quickly cause check averages to stagnate. The problem is exacerbated when employees aren’t adequately recognized for their contributions: why put in discretionary effort when you’re not feeling appreciated?

Apple American Group (the nation’s largest Applebee’s franchisee, with 450 units) made recognition a top organizational priority, with sales of the flagship “Perfect Margarita” serving as a primary performance gauge. Management quickly realized, however, that their rock star team members consistently took the top three slots in competitions, reaping the lion’s share of kudos. This presented a quandary: how could GMs meaningfully recognize middle-of-the-pack employees and encourage low-performers?

Solution: Enter Smart Alerts, ShiftOne’s proprietary, AI-powered performance analysis system. Instead of measuring basic quantitative metrics, Smart Alerts examine the rate of change: the algorithm can identify, week-over-week, which employees have improved their performance the most — and which have declined.

Smart Alerts deploy automatically via simple email to management across the organizational hierarchy. Leadership from the GM-level all the way up to the CEO receives tri-weekly breakdowns of top team members, with empirical details of their performance shifts and direct links to the ShiftOne platform to easily facilitate recognition.

Smart Alerts helped leaders send more than 100,000 recognition messages via ShiftOne in 2019, and the “Perfect Margarita” sales competition powered by the app yielded 20% sales outperformance for app users.

Enterprise C-suite executives are responsible for thousands of frontline team members, but individual top-to-bottom touch points — one of the most impactful forms of employee recognition — are scarce.

Challenge: Executives lack an avenue to engage directly with the hourly employees driving day-to-day operations. Frontline team members don’t have company-issued email addresses, and enterprise CEOs lack the schedule flexibility to visit each and every unit.

Further, KPI tracking at the executive level is typically restricted to high-level metrics that obscure individual rockstar performers.

The CEOs at Apple American Group (with 450 Applebee’s locations nationwide) and Lehigh Valley Restaurant Group (the country’s top-performing Red Robin franchisee) sought a method of identifying and congratulating upper-echelon servers.

Solution: After implementing ShiftOne across their organizations, Flynn Restaurant Group CEO Greg Flynn and LVRG CEO Mike Axiotis have instant access to real-time, per-restaurant team member performance via leaderboards on their personal devices. They leverage this unprecedented transparency to shout out workers who rise to the top.

How many cooks can say they’ve been celbrated by a chief executive who oversees 1000+ restaurant units?

A classic operator’s adage: what you measure is what you move. Good brands know which unique KPIs are driving their success and maintain a constant finger on the pulse of the numbers that matter. The best brands take that monitoring a step further and ensure that their hourly team members — the men and women driving sales and guest satisfaction each and every day — know exactly which metrics to drill down on.

Challenge: Even companies with refined employee “scorecards” — amalgamations of crucial metrics like guest check average that every front of house team member has influence over — face a fundamental stumbling block: the intense manual effort necessary to keep the data current; and the struggle to keep numbers accessible and relevant.

Top general managers are known to track scorecards via spreadsheet and even print them out on a daily basis, posting results back of house. But every moment leadership is bent over a screen in the office is time away from the floor, and in this digital age it’s never been easier for team members to ignore a smattering of printer pages posted to a board.

GMs at entertainment titan Dave & Buster’s (140 units) were burning hours of productivity each week updating spreadsheets, and — more importantly — struggling to engage an increasingly millennial team demographic with paper reporting. D&B sought a method of rejuvenating the scorecard tracking process and connecting more deeply with their modernizing employee base

Solution: D&B uses ShiftOne to power an automatically-updating, mobile digital scorecard for all team members, guaranteeing that individualized performance metrics are never further away than a few taps on a screen. Concurrently, management across the hierarchy leverages streamlined performance access to celebrate top performers via TeamStream, ShiftOne’s native chat feed. For even deeper performance insights, GMs receive tri-weekly Smart Alerts, simple AI-powered insights delivered via email that provide empirical fuel for recognition.

Within months, D&B saw gains of up to 10% on key scorecard metrics, and a tenure analysis of 2019 data showed that ShiftOne users remained employed an average of twice as long as non-users.

These are philosophical challenges with very palpable ramifications. Delivery solutions are ubiquitous; average check size is decaying; employees are demanding more flexibility and transparency; guests are conditioned to expect a streamlined and tech-infused experience.

Challenge: In a saturated restaurant field, it’s never been more crucial to maximize the value of each customer. That means not only finding and retaining the best people, but fostering brand unity and doubling down on classic sales best practices.

Frisch’s Big Boy (100 units nationally) lacked communication channels to and between their frontline, and relied on manual tracking to drive revenue-boosting initiatives on high-margin menu options. As corporate leaders worked to rejuvenate culture and recharge their approach to sales contests, they were stymied by a dearth of direct pipelines to hourly team members and outdated competition infrastructure.

Solution: When Frisch’s deployed ShiftOne organization-wide, the floodgates were open: each restaurant averages over 100 engagements — comments, recognition messages, photos, videos, even .gifs — per month at each unit in TeamStream, ShiftOne’s native chatfeed. Corporate trainers and marketers rely on this unprecedented channel to push content and tips directly to servers.

The inaugural sales competition powered by ShiftOne — enabling users for the first time to consult automatically-updating leaderboards with a few taps on their personal device — generated a staggering 50% outperformance on sales vs. team members who chose not to use the platform.

Challenge: Lehigh Valley Restaurant Group, the nation’s top-performing Red Robin franchisee, sought a method of supplementing their hands-on management style with a consistent, omnipresent channel. Leadership right up the CEO routinely visits restaurants, but stakeholders can only be one place at a time, and the value of celebration increases exponentially the further up the organizational hierarchy the recognizer sits.

One major barrier to most digital communication solutions: frontline workers don’t have company-provided emails. Some may not have emails at all, while others may not own a computer or, in more rural areas, even have consistent internet access.

In this tech-centric epoch, though, what 96% of American do have is a cell phone, and more than 85% of those devices are “smart,” according to Pew Research.

The legal imbroglio of texting hourly team members prohibits reliance on SMS as a means of communication, but if there were a method of making participation in a mobile-first communications system optional, the sky would be the limit.

Solution: After launching ShiftOne across both front of house and heart of house teams, the platform — which is always positioned as optional — garnered a nearly 90% hourly adoption rate within weeks. They quickly flocked to TeamStream, ShiftOne’s in-app chat interface, to exchange .gifs, memes, photos from shift, and other content.

Leadership wasted no time seizing upon this novel pipeline to the frontline population: in the first month alone the organization tallied over 250 TeamStream engagements per location, from direct team member recognition from the CEO to quick GM selfie videos reviewing guest satisfaction scores.

In addition, GMs observed an immediate and sustained uptick in guest check averages across the organization.

Challenge: Founded in 1978 as a single-unit casual dining concept in Tennessee, Ruby Tuesday has expanded rapidly over the intervening fifty years and currently claims a global footprint of about 500 restaurants.

Since its inception, the bottomless garden bar has been a signature Ruby Tuesday offering, providing tremendous flexibility to diners and an easy-to-teach upsell opportunity to servers.

With a new top chef on the scene and a major brand rejuvenation under its belt, though, sales of the classic “garden bar add-on,” a supplemental version of the offering, began to plateau, leaving incremental revenue on the table.

Solution: Within weeks of launching ShiftOne across their U.S. enterprise, Ruby Tuesday achieved 91% team member adoption: over 13,000 frontline hourly workers had downloaded and activated their accounts.

Stirred by tens of thousands of manager and corporate recognition messages deployed via TeamStream, ShiftOne’s in-app communications interface, and tracking numbers on automatically updating leaderboards, team members doubled down on the add-on garden bar pitch during the first month of ShiftOne implementation.

Results were striking: app-users outperformed non-users by a full 10% on garden bar add-ons.