Checkers® & Rally’s®

Learn how Checkers & Rally’s creates mobile and social learning that boosts employee engagement and drives greater guest satisfaction.

Checkers & Rally’s, an iconic and innovative drive-thru restaurant chain known for its bold, craveable food, famous fries, exceptional value, and people-first attitude, operates and franchises both Checkers^® and Rally’s^® restaurants. The brand has earned several of the industry’s most prestigious awards, including: “#1 Most Craveable Fries” by Restaurant Business 2020 and 2018; Best Franchise Deal and “Best Drive-Thru in America” by QSR Magazine; “Top Food and Beverage Franchise” by Franchise Business Review; the “Hot! Again” award from Nation’s Restaurant News and has consistently been ranked on Entrepreneur’s Franchise 500.

With 850 restaurants across the U.S. and room to grow, Checkers & Rally’s is a proven brand with flexible building formats that is aggressively expanding across the country. The company announced its goal of increasing total units by fifty percent over the next five years. Every new build will be based on its innovative Restaurant of the Future, a reimagining of the brand’s iconic look that features a new kitchen engine that reduces collective team member walking by 1.5 miles every hour and AI voice-assisted ordering at the drive- thru, meant to make employees’ jobs more doable and more enjoyable.

In addition to craveable and bold food, the company is dedicated to being a place where franchisees and employees who work hard can create opportunities for themselves, their families, and their communities. With labor shortages in the industry, attracting and retaining employees is another consideration for growth. Enter “Crazy Good Learning,” Checkers & Rally’s innovative employee learning program that engages team members with mobile and social collaboration across the organization.

Organize learning to fit the organization.

Rather than a “one-size-fits-all” approach, the next-generation learning solution would need to meet the complex requirements of the company’s business model. Thirty percent of the company’s 850 restaurants are corporate-owned, and seventy percent are franchised. With this mix of corporate and franchised locations, Checkers & Rally’s needed a learning platform designed to fit the company’s unique organizational structure.

For example, an individual learner at a franchisee-operated restaurant may need to be associated with the franchise location, a multi-unit owner office, a regional group, or a territory. Unlike most learning management systems built for top-down, pyramid-style organizational structures, Schoox enables Checkers & Rally’s to organize learning according to relationships like person-to-person, person-to-unit, and unit-to-person, which opens opportunities for hyper-focused communication, learning content, information sharing, reporting, and much more.

Connect with employees anytime, anywhere.

The Checkers & Rally’s learning and development team wanted to enhance the training program to ensure it was positioned to effectively train restaurant teams, boost guest satisfaction, and support its business goals. With most of its 12,000 team members on the move serving guests in restaurants, mobile learning is a must. Through a native mobile app, the new learning solution offers a sleek interface that:

• Allows learners to view and take courses on any device
• Enables users to view and take assessments
• Includes strong search capabilities
• Supports social learning and collaboration

Create opportunities for authentic engagement.

With a mobile learning solution in place, Checkers & Rally’s learning and development team turned their attention to how to create authentic connections with employees. They decided to use a social platform many of their staff were already using in their day-to-day lives, to serve up content in a fun and unique way.

Launching the program with short video blasts, the company creates microlearnings to support on-the-job training. “We decided to simply shoot the microlearnings in portrait mode on a mobile phone to maintain the ‘realness’ of the content found across the platform,” said Theresa Papaleo, Senior Director of Learning & People Development at Checkers & Rally’s.

Team members access these short video blasts by scanning QR codes posted on communication boards in every location. All Checkers & Rally’s stores have two iPads available for staff to access learning. To launch the corresponding video, employees scan the QR code that matches the skill they want to review.

Checkers & Rally’s launched these micro learnings at the beginning of the year, aligning learning videos with the company’s first-quarter focus areas on taste and temperature. Topics like “serving up the perfect fry” allow staff to go to the content they need during their shift. “Short video blasts are incredibly popular with our staff,” said Papaleo. “The number of employees logging onto the learning platform has doubled year over year, and team members are eager to put into practice what they’ve just learned.”

Checkers & Rally’s innovative “Crazy Good Learning” was so successful it even won Silver in the Best Use of Video category in the 2022 Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards.

Deliver a consistent customer experience.

As Checkers & Rally’s moves forward on its rapid growth trajectory, the company wants to ensure it continues to deliver a consistent customer experience across all locations. Papaleo’s team will play a significant role in that effort as they onboard new staff and work to keep learner engagement high.

The learning and development team plans to introduce badging to recognize employees who meet specific goals or achieve various positional or managerial certifications. They also expect to launch leaderboards to encourage friendly competition among team members and focus on social collaboration to cultivate an engaged workforce across all locations and in every job role.