How Front Burner increased restaurant customer satisfaction and NPS with Docebo

As Front Burner’s Manager of Training and Learning Systems, Josh Bonanno is tasked with giving frontline employees the tools they need to maintain consistency, safety, and quality for 93 restaurant locations. It’s no easy task, and the high employee turnover rates in the hospitality industry make it even trickier.

As a franchise operation, it’s important to get training buy-in from restaurant owners and managers, as well as employees. To do that, Josh and his team needed to demonstrate the ROI of training for the brand. Otherwise, franchise owners wouldn’t see the value of training, and wouldn’t push learning initiatives at their locations.

When Josh was promoted into his current role 3 years ago, completion rates for mandatory training were below 35% across locations—too low for the training to deliver any real value to their restaurants.

Josh and the training team needed to create a “learning hub,” a go-to resource that employees could log into and return to again and again to upskill—and that franchise owners and restaurant managers would support. The learning platform they had been using didn’t offer the functionality to make those goals a reality.

They needed a platform that could serve not only the complexity of their franchise organization structure, but also convince very different users (managers, owners, and frontline employees) of the value that training could offer.

Front Burner switched platforms and transformed their entire training program on Docebo. Josh and his team knew that Docebo had the flexibility and functionality to get Front Burner’s thousands of employees to engage in their learning initiatives. They began to build the “learning hub” employees needed so that they could access training easily on a regular basis.

Now Josh just needed to convince the franchisees across their numerous restaurants. To get buy-in from franchise owners and have them engage on the platform, Josh and his team used Docebo to host webinars with content geared to the franchisees and even live in person conferences on Docebo. That way, they could see for themselves how easy the platform was to use, and how much employees had to gain from training.

Additionally, Front Burner gave their subject matter experts the ability to make content directly on the platform. Closing the gap between experts and learners made the company more agile. It also increased engagement, because each expert came with their own audience.

All of this, coupled with Docebo’s in-depth reporting capabilities (and integration with Tableau), allowed Josh and his team to show the value training could offer by demonstrating the correlation between employee training, revenue, and positive guest feedback.

Now, when promos or new menu items come out, the training team can quickly create and publish content about it in Docebo. Front Burner leverages Docebo’s app and QR code capabilities to give employees access to learning directly on their phones.

The training team has also implemented surveys and feedback from employees accessing training. Now, corporate teams can get feedback on marketing initiatives or menu changes from the employees on the ground, who are in direct contact with customers. Surfacing this data has given the T&D team a “seat at the table” with Ops and Marketing and improved collaboration between teams.

In the 3 years since they first implemented Docebo, Front Burner has increased the number of monthly platform users 6x. Frontline staff are actually using the platform regularly, and course completion rates have gone from 35% to 87%.

Using online training also saves managers an estimated 14 hours of training each month. Ramp-up times for new employees have decreased, and the company’s NPS has gone up considerably, peaking at +58 this year. There’s a clear correlation between higher NPS and Google ratings for locations that have higher learning engagement and completion rates. The top 46 locations who engaged in training have Net Promoter Scores 5 points higher than other locations, and franchise owners have taken notice.

Front Burner also runs a yearly donation campaign for St. Jude Hospital for pediatric cancer. This year, Josh was able to track the impact that learning engagement had on donations: the top 46 locations that engaged with St. Jude training content on Docebo earned $100,000 more in donations than the bottom 46 locations in just a three-week timespan.

That’s $100,000 more going to help cure childhood cancer thanks to increased engagement within the Docebo learning platform.