How Chick-fil-A Trains Friendly Employees and gets 94% Order Accuracy.

Chick-fil-A sets the standard for customer experience in the quick service restaurant (QSR) industry. This has a great deal to do with the way employees are trained and treated by their superiors. Chick-fil-A employees are trained extremely well on both the menu and customer service. Chick-fil-A has not only planted their flag at the pinnacle of customer experience—they own the whole peak.

Here’s how you can use Chick-fil-A’s digital training methods to get friendly employees in your store.

How to improve employee performance in your store

Last year’s report from QSR Magazine showed just how far ahead Chick-fil-A is when it comes to revenue per store.

As it stands, Chick-fil-A makes nearly twice as much per location as it’s closest competitor—McDonald’s.

So, what’ is Chick-fil-A doing that keeps it head and shoulders above industry leaders in revenue per store?

Most Chick-fil-A stores have moved away from paper checklists and training to digital restaurant operations.

This has helped Chick-fil-A win the customer experience battle for the quick service restaurant industry.

Focusing on employee performance, Chick-fil-A has prioritized two things in their stores: accurate orders and friendly service.

Here’s a breakdown of how Chick-fil-A is leveraging technology in their stores to improve those stats, and deliver friendly customer service at every location.

How to Get Friendly Employees like Chick-fil-A

We’ve all been in a restaurant where the employees are visibly rattled. The lunch rush is happening and there’s no way they can catch up. It’s all they can do to keep their heads above water.

This is rarely—if ever—the case at Chick-fil-A. You’ll notice how many more employees Chick-fil-A has in its stores compared to other leading restaurant brands. That’s because proper employee coverage is directly related to customer experience. A shorthanded store is undoubtedly less friendly than a store full of relaxed employees.

If your store shows a drastic drop-off in customer experience when one or two employees fail to show up, it’s almost certain that the store is understaffed. When a store is understaffed, employees go from “amazing customer experience” mode, into “get this customer their food” mode. This isn’t their fault, either. They’re trying to make the best of a bad situation, which is an understaffed store.

Employee scheduling solutions like SmartSense can help you curb understaffing, and ensure you’ve got the coverage to keep employees friendly, Even in the short term, staffing your stores more robustly will improve customer experience and employee friendliness.

To get friendly employees every day like Chick-fil-A, you’ll need to adopt a digital scheduling solution to ensure proper coverage, 100% of the time.

How Chick-fil-A improves order accuracy

With a focus on the customer, Chick-fil-A trains employees to deliver exactly the same service at every location.

That means training must be uniform from California to Carolina, with no “here’s how we do it in this store” in between.

With order accuracy scores above 94%, Chick-fil-A is a clear leader in the fast food industry when it comes to getting orders right the first time.

Chick-fil-A franchisees use digital training methods to ensure employees are building the right muscle memory when it comes to the menu and method.

Using the iPad in each store, Chick-fil-A employees are quizzed on brand standards and menu items inside SmartSense.

You only have to ask how many pickles go on a sandwich a few times before every staff member knows, “it’s two.”

This not only helps employees remember, but ensures every store receives exactly the same training.

Many Chick-fil-A stores use SmartSense's Jolt app to train every staff member on how to complete labeling and prep, too.

By adopting digital training with SmartSense, Chick-fil-A is able to deliver accurate orders 94.5% of the time — a near perfect score.

Chick-fil-A Is all-in on digital restaurant operations

By using digital training, quizzing, and scheduling, Chick-fil-A is able to improve employee performance across the board.

That’s why they lead the QSR industry in revenue per location.

Chick-fil-A’s orders are so accurate, customers don’t double check the bag for sauce. Giving your customers that kind of confidence pays dividends in both the short and long term.

We’ll show you have we’ve helped thousands of restaurants across the globe quit using paper and move to digital operations to improve team accountability, digital food safety compliance, and employee performance.