PlayerLync
Next-Gen E-learning for Better Customer experience

PlayerLync is a modern learning software that combines mobility, digital forms, content distribution, and daily performance management into a single solution to help operational teams of all sectors deliver exceptional customer experiences. In this interview, Bob Paulsen, President and CEO of PlayerLync shares some insights about his organization’s learning solutions for the food and beverages industry, their unique value proposition, and roadmap for the future.

As a company that is committed to improving restaurant’s workforce environment, what do you think are the imminent challenges confronting the restaurant industry and how is your company addressing those challenges effectively?

In today’s competitive restaurant industry there is a growing demand for an outstanding and positive impression of a great customer experience. A major obstacle to excellence is the high employee turnover rate and revolving knowledge that inevitably comes with attrition. Since the staff is the most valuable asset in delivering and ensuring the desired customer experience, they need tools to quickly learn and resolve problems to preserve consistency.

Patrons expect some degree of change or innovation, and the ever-changing recipes and menu items, and promotions of specials, amongst others are placing more pressure on the restaurants, to keep the frontline workforce up-to-date and following the workflow.

To overcome these challenges and help restaurants optimize the working environment, we offer a learning solution that is the best fit for today’s modern worker. Our mobile solution ensures that right from the first day of joining the organization, employees will have all the needed operational support at their fingertips in a multi- media rich, highly-engaging, and interactive format. This allows them to have a single go-to source for learning and excelling in their daily operational tasks that is usable anywhere.

PlayerLync equips managers and frontline workers with everything they need–training materials, how to videos, digital forms, SOPs, messaging and notifications, compliance information and certifications, virtually any content format. We make it accessible on mobile devices in highly engaging and interactive formats, and the best part is that the staff doesn’t have to download the files. It happens automatically. Everything is two taps away. PlayerLync digitizes and enhances communication and information sharing between customers and restaurants, thereby increasing revenue, reducing cost, and ultimately delivering better customer experience.

As the restaurant, food and beverage landscape have evolved, could you mention some of the current trends and how has PlayerLync injected these trends into its solution offerings?

There’s a major shift toward mobility and rich content, be it on a tablet or mobile phone. These are the preferred devices of folks entering the workforce who are more accustomed to technology and applications.

But more importantly, they’re simply more convenient to use in environments where people work on their feet. Today it’s all about engaging content, collaboration and contribution, self-help and sharing ideas across peer groups. Before PlayerLync, it was impossible to embrace the breadth of these activities and processes as a routine part of daily work activities within restaurant, retail and hospitality. Companies that use PlayerLync experience higher employee engagement, greater levels of collaboration within and across stores, and a level of management transparency they’d previously only dreamed of.

For example, to stay current with the latest food safety compliances or racial bias training, companies can deliver interactive content and video through our platform, and then quiz or track viewing and performance right down to the individual user. If needed, users can provide feedback or ask questions to peers or managers. Because it’s so easy to publish or even create content and videos, or even upload eLearning packages within PlayerLync, the speed of rollout is almost immediate. Companies can react fast or even incept problems before they occur. And best of all, PlayerLync works offline because the content is compressed securely on the device. Only authorized people can access it and we can schedule syncing to happen after hours so bandwidth is protected during the day. IT teams love us for that.

How can customers get up and running with your software?

PlayerLync’s modular design allows us to integrate with customer’s existing systems, be it operational or messaging system, while streamlining business processes. Our aim is to fill the gaps present in learning, operations, and content management. Further, PlayerLync’s accepts LMS content and delivers traditional eLearning courses to mobile devices. It also tracks course completion and introduces a data-rich mobile learning environment in order to facilitate the next generation of learning and performance support solutions for mobile workers. Through PlayerLync, the frontline workforce has a blended view of rich content that was pushed locally through the device side by side with access and links to other systems.

Could you please discuss a case scenario where PlayerLync solutions helped a company in addressing their challenges?

Recently one of the large restaurants reached out to support their employee training program. The restaurant has multiple departments such as soup, salad, and pizza within a single working environment. However, they had trained different people for different segments, which limited their flexibility during peak times. For instance, if there were only two people trained in an area, then one of them had to be there at all times. By leveraging our modern workforce software, they were able to cross-train their employees and gain tremendous benefits as it made scheduling much easier. We worked with them on ensuring that their frontline workers received a certification on different abilities and stations. We were able to push the right content to their mobile devices, enabling them to learn and certify for new roles quickly. The impact to staffing schedules and reducing costs can be huge.

Can you share details of the firm’s plans pertaining to new solutions and technologies that could play a role in the company’s offerings in the near future? PlayerLync is backed by a proficient team that has broad experience in the food and beverage landscape. In partnership with customers, we’re redefining what it means to be a learning organization and we’re continuing to innovate how learning and performance support occurs more meaningfully. We’re all about ease of use, open platforms and modernizing the workforce through convenient and secure mobile solutions. We embrace customer feedback and because of it we’re constantly coming up with new ways to adapt our solution to every customer environment through configurable flexibility. We’re even exploring task automation and rolling out Bluetooth-enabled systems that can simplify data collection and repetitive checks to reduce the time it takes to do those and essentially eliminate manual errors. Our Bluetooth solution can simplify food temperature checks, for example, by automatically sensing and logging the data while someone walks by a station and focuses on a visual check. That’s innovative!