Success Story

Skyrocketing service and cleanliness scores with training course

for Denny's

For over 70 years, Denny’s has been America’s diner, where people can connect over great food. One of Denny’s hallmarks is their connection to their customers, known as “Guests,” and their constant pursuit of excellence. When Denny’s wanted to boost their in-restaurant training programs around customer service and restaurant cleanliness, they turned to The URL dr. The outcome? Great success and skyrocketing scores! Read on…

Project Information

Objectives

Services Used

Client Specs

In Peter's Own Words

“Our customer service scores went up by, I want to say 20 or 30 points. We went from middle of the pack as far as our peers go, and now we lead the industry because of this material.... We wanted to see if we could also have an increase in scores if we developed a course in restaurant cleanliness. I'm proud to say, even though we were doing pretty good, we increased another five points. Since we launched the course, we've been very excited about the results."

Update from Peter: "Happy to let you know that [Denny's] scores have continued to rise. During our interview I said that cleanliness had gone up 5 points, it is now up by 11. Thanks."

How We Helped

Denny's Challenge

Peter Gallagher, the Learning & Development Manager at Denny’s, and his team needed to develop an e-learning course on restaurant cleanliness, or as they call it, “Pride for Environment.”

After seeing success with a previous URL dr project within Denny’s, where customer service Black Box Intelligence scores increased 20-30 points, Peter wanted to see if it was possible to increase their cleanliness scores, too!

They had the curriculum, but needed to turn it into an online course that would be effective for learning in multiple languages and in a mobile learning format.

Most of what they had seen were long, talking head, video courses. They wanted something interactive and engaging for their people. They needed help from a professional instructional designer who could look at their content and help them figure out how to segment it and make it more interactive and engaging.

Our Approach to Course Design

The team at The URL dr took the video content and written curriculum Denny’s provided and transformed it into a highly engaging and interactive course that spoke their audience’s language.

We developed hundreds of custom elements featuring Denny’s locations, environments, characters, roles, and training scenarios. These elements helped put Denny’s team members into common scenarios they might face everyday on the job. In addition, our animations made the courses fun and engaging. We also developed Spanish and English versions to better speak to Denny’s diverse family of employees.

The courses were jointly designed in Articulate Rise and Articulate Storyline. They feature interactive elements that increased engagement. The URL dr also incorporated Denny’s brand color scheme and visuals into the material to match their existing learning and development infrastructure.

Our Solution

The URL dr built a custom training course that first teaches the foundational concepts using custom animation featuring Denny’s characters and iconography to outline the core content. Then, it reinforces the material through a custom-programmed interactive gamification component, prompting learners to put their knowledge to the test and select “incorrect” imagery in each of the desired environments.

The entire course – which included text, interactive animation, voice over audio and graphics – was translated into a Spanish version. Providing the course in multiple languages ensured that a higher percentage of Denny’s diverse workforce could successfully engage with the content.

Although cleanliness was already scoring above average on Black Box Intelligence, Denny’s saw an 11 point improvement in this area after implementing The URL dr’s course for their staff.

"We are a franchise model. It's just not practical to have an in-person training for this type of content. On top of that, it's much more costly and time demanding. But, with a solid interactive online course, we've found that we're able to dramatically affect the course of the business."

Kim Merritt

The URL dr

"Can I lend a hand?"

Developing video for e-learning courses, marketing, and social media, is one of our specialties. Our video production services have been used by both Fortune 500s and small business. The URL dr is a video production company that produces 100% of our work is produced here in the US. Our video services will help bring your story to life. Let’s talk about how we can work together.

We’ll make your video look fabulous!