At GSummit Wednesday we ran into Robin Jenkins, the Regional Marketing Manager of 138 Applebees restaurants under the RMH Franchise Corporation, the second largest Applebees group. She talked with us about her collaboration with Bunchball to increase employee engagement at Applebees restaurants.
Last July, Jenkins began working with Bunchball to see if gamification can solve her employee turnover problem. The meager goal was to decrease turnover from 135 percent to 125 percent. With 9,000 employees and every employee costing $1,500 from the time it takes to look at applications, perform interviews, go through the onboarding process and training, this would result in significant savings.
Knowing that 73 percent of their workforce were millennials (age 16 to 31), Bunchball created a web app, Bee Block, for Applebees employees. It was important that the form the gamification tools took was one that the young, millennial employees would be able to relate to and access frequently. Bee Block allows hourly employees to keep track of missions, goals, a trophies case, news feed and other engagement drivers while on the job.
After progressive rollout began in February, Bee Block managed to decrease employee turnover by 20 percent in only 6 months. Bee Block will roll out to the remainder of RMH Franchise Corporation’s 138 Applebees restaurants next week, and the potential gains across the whole franchise are highly anticipated.
This improvement, and the direction Jenkins plans to take the program from here, was made possible by data driven decisions. Data from their point of sale system was fed into Bunchball’s data analysis system, Nitro Analytics, and used to look for specific metrics that needed to be targeted as well as to monitor Bee Blocks correlation with the decreasing employee turnover rate.
Taking business intelligence even farther, Jenkins partnered with RMH’s Applebees marketing department to figure out what sales they should be driving. That decided, they were able to coordinate monthly featured contests and update Bee Block’s missions, goals and trophy collections to target those hot spots.
Last month, a dramatic display of gamification effectiveness unraveled at RMH’s Make-A-Wish fundraiser challenge. With the sole addition of a restaurant leaderboard, restaurants that previously had raised as little as $25 last year raised $1,500 this year. Not only are these gamification tools helping RMH’s Applebees restaurants save money, but they are helping these restaurants do good too.
To find more podcast interviews from similar events, check out Clark Buckner’s list of tech conferences at TechnologyAdvice.com.
Listen to the interview here on TA’s Soundcloud.
Takeaways:
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Increased engagement can even decrease employee turnover
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Millennial age workforces benefit from millennially oriented gamification tools
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Data driven decisions amplify the effectiveness of gamification implementation
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Properly implemented gamification can have a positive impact on the world
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This interview was provided by Gsummit media partner TechnologyAdvice, an Inc. 5000 company that is dedicated to educating, advising, and connecting the buyers and sellers of business technology. Interview conducted by Clark Buckner.
