This franchise group almost tripled LTO sales by using technology to offer timely, effective incentives to team members.
Better communication generally translates to better sales, customer service, and overall operations. The team at Anderson Management, which operates seven Buffalo Wild Wings franchise locations throughout Montana, understands the impact that timely and easily actionable communication has on operational success.
Until Anderson Management implemented Shift, an employee engagement platform, daily communication was time-consuming and not efficient enough to be useful for team members. The quick-service restaurant industry’s fast-paced nature means that communication platforms need to keep up with the speed of information.
Every summer, Anderson Management runs a Twisted Tea promotion, and while previous years have been successful, once Anderson Management began using Shift, the campaign became much more profitable. This year, Anderson Management was able to top last year’s units sold after just 19 days of their 60-day Twisted Tea promotion. Sales were projected to increase by 245 percent year-over-year, but by August 2023, the promotion had skyrocketed to achieve a 261 percent increase over last year’s sales. The major change was this year they used Shift to power TV screens in the back of house to communicate with staff.
Prior to implementing Shift, Anderson Management used to gather and send out data to team members manually, which was time-consuming and oftentimes did not reach the employees. “A huge problem was the lag time between the office and getting information to the stores in a timely manner. For example, I was re-running a contest, and every Monday those reports needed to go out to the store so that they could be printed and posted somewhere. So Shift really took away the middleman from these communication issues,” David Moorhead, Anderson Management director of marketing and finance, says.
Even if the message was able to get to the different franchise locations in a timely manner, there was still a barrier in ensuring team members saw the message and applied it to what they were doing. “That is what we’ve used [Shift] for. It is a sales-building tool, as well as a place to highlight a job well done for our deskless employees. We can display the top 10 servers in real time and create healthy competition. You can highlight those servers who are doing a really good job at selling a particular product and attaching Blazin’ Rewards [loyalty program] to transactions,” Moorhead says.
According to Moorhead, Shift’s ease of use allowed employees to have an incentive in mind that made participating in promotions and rewards programs easier. All of this contributed to a bump in sales. Employees knew how other stores were performing with rewards programs and promotions, and realized there could be healthy competition as day-to-day performance was highlighted across the company.
“[Shift] is great because it is an employee retention and sales-building platform. It makes employee communication a lot easier too. With [Shift], you can put out a bulletin in two minutes to every store in the state instead of sending out an email. It is such a time saver,” Moorhead says.
For more information, visit the Shift Website.
By Ya’el McLoud
