Olive Garden Will Offer Online Ordering

 

Darden Restaurants Inc. is expected to rollout its online ordering this month at its Olive Garden restaurants and test web-based reservations and tabletop tablets this summer at LongHorn Steakhouse.

Founder William Darden, opened the first Red Lobster in 1968, and Joseph Lee, was the manager of that first restaurant and later a CEO of the chain.  As the chain grew, Olive Garden became its flagship brand. The technology in Darden restaurants has expanded beyond the cash register to include terminals that reception staffers use to check in guests and kitchen display systems that queue up orders for cooks out back. The goal of Darden’s Check-Level Analytics project is to gather information from every step of the guest experience and use it to make better management decisions. Olive Garden’s nationwide rollout of online ordering should be complete by August. Tabletop tablets will be tested this year. The chain has 830 units in the United States and six in Canada. Darden, for example,  uses analytics to understand its customers and has added data mining and other tools to better predict customer behaviors. Chili’s Grill & Bar, the division of Dallas-based Brinker International, said last September that it would complete a rollout of tabletop tablets to all 823 U.S. company-owned restaurants by the middle of this year. Kansas City, Mo.-based Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill & Bar, the division of DineEquity Inc., said in December it would roll out touch-screen tablets to its 1,865 U.S. restaurants this year. And Minneapolis, Minn.-based Buffalo Wild Wings. Inc. said in March that it would have tablet computers in 500 locations by the end of this year and in all of its more than 1,000 restaurants in North America by late 2015.

Workforce Scientist-Data & Psychology

 

Workforce scientists gather real data to identify which personality traits would make a candidate psychologically-predisposed to being an ideal employee for a specific work environment.

“Analytics allows business operators to continuously challenge assumptions about how to expand and manage their workforces profitably,” says Dr. David Ostberg, vice president of Workforce Science at Evolv, a San Francisco-based data analysis and workforce probability firm.

Evolv’s researchers have discovered that many traits commonly screened for in the hiring process don’t accurately predict job performance. For example, their analyzed data from 21,115 call center agents and discovered that “previous employment duration is a very weak predictor of how long a new hire will stay on a job.” Instead, the data shows that a person’s creativity, curiosity and ability to multitask correlate more strongly with how long they might stay on the job. Although call centers each have unique requirements, most traits identified as predictors of retention are relevant to all of them.

In order to assess whether candidates possess these predictive traits, companies must employ a more psychologically-based approach to hiring. In 2012, Transcom, a global call center operator with over 30,000 customer service specialists, hired Evolv, a company that uses predictive analytics to reduce attrition.

This involved giving candidates a realistic preview of the demanding nature of the position, then assessing their competency using actual job simulations. Additionally, they asked candidates “forced choice questions” that require more self-reflection. For example, the answer to this forced question would tell recruiters whether the applicant is curious by nature:

With an analytical approach and a more psychology-based approach to hiring, this call center was able to transform its hiring process, reduce attrition, and reduce costs. By using  data analysis technology and workforce psychology, call center operators now have intelligent tools to help them determine what type of people succeed in call center environments.