Ask restaurant managers in an unguarded moment what is the most frustrating part of their job and you likely will hear one thing: interruptions from staff. Questions come fast and they come furious. If only managers could tell colleagues to just check their phones and get out of their hair.
Now they can, thanks to Opus Training, which today is launching Ask Opus, a new AI-powered platform designed to allow employees easy access to answers.
Rachael Nemeth, CEO of Opus Training
“Ask Opus gives a nine-second response time so that you can get those answers without bothering a shift lead,” said Rachael Nemeth, CEO of Opus Training, in an interview.
Opus has been in the training game for a while and already works with such pedigreed brands as Bonchon Chicken, Bahama Bucks, and Blaze Pizza. It takes all the minutiae of a brand’s policies and distills them into training modules. And now it can make info available in an Ask Jeeves kind of way.
“Employees can use Ask Opus directly from their phones, turning every question into a mini-training exercise,” she said. “We still have capabilities on desktop and tablet but the reality is 98 percent of our users prefer to access information that way. An employee may pull out their phone, check their schedule, answer an email from a manager, and now they can self-educate.”
This has the potential to preserve the sanity of managers, who often can’t walk across the floor without feeling like Brad Pitt dealing with paparazzi.
“It’s not unusual for frontline employees to interrupt their managers dozens of times per shift,” she said. “One of the fast-casual chains we work with saves $16,000 annually just from time savings for managers.”
This tool provides more than just basic information on store hours and sick-day policies.
“Generic AI tools don’t understand your business,” she said. “Ask Opus is training on your specific manuals, from your standard operating policies to your recipes and your videos. Whatever a brand has we can use and train it.”
It knows how to correctly parse the information as well.
“We can apply your access rules, which is nerdy but important to operators,” she said. “A team members won’t get manager-level information.”
Just like no two brands are exactly the same, neither should their training programs be. Opus has years of experience of slicing its modules like an onion.
“The Jose Andres Group may need to do front-of-house and back-of-house training while Bahama Bucks may want to cross-train everyone,” she said. “The use of the platform changes depending on the needs of the operation.”
One of the ambitions for Opus is to transform training from a reactive element to one embedded deep in a brand’s profit center.
“The goal isn’t just to train people but to turn training into the central nervous system of your hourly workforce,” she said. “Traditionally training hasn’t been something that brands thoughts of as something that can drive the business forward.”
Also a boon to the bottom line is in being able to adjust quickly to consumer feedback.
“We have our Guest Feedback Integration, which turns consumer reactions into immediate action. We’re partnering with Ovation to help provide and analyze feedback and turn into location-specific training recommendations.”
Unsurprisingly, AI is the engine behind much of this advancement.
“This is about inserting AI in the areas where we can save the time of managers,” she said. “This is the true definition of just-in-time training. Everything before was scheduled training. This is different. With Ask Opus we can deliver on the promise of getting you the answer exactly when you need it. There’s no better way to help employees feel connected to their job than to give them the tools they need to get answers.”
