Earlier this month, Church’s Chicken closed all of its Nashville locations for 18 hours for employees to attend “an intense customer service training boot camp”.  While extreme, the “close and train” theme had occurred before.  In 2008, Starbucks famously closed all 7,100 of its American stores for 3 hours to train staff.  According to a New York Times article on the subject, Starbucks employees learned espresso-culture tips such as “’without aeration, the milk screams and lacks sweetness.’ And: ‘The perfect milk requires surfing the tip of the steam wand until the sound is SSHHHH.’”

While Starbucks has clearly recovered its mojo since 2008 (the stock has doubled since the training day), the question remains:  what is the incremental sales impact of the training programs themselves?  Do these programs overcome a breakeven hurdle given the loss in sales (and potentially customer satisfaction) that results from closing the network and turning away customers for a period of time?

While some chains made a statement with big ticket programs, all restaurateurs make smaller ticket training program decisions on a regular basis that are also designed to improve service and drive repeat business.

By tracking training programs, either by restaurant or by individual employee, companies can measure the sales and customer satisfaction impact of these programs. Accurate measurement requires comparing performance of staff participating in training events against a set of control restaurants or control employees with similar characteristics who receive no additional training.  By understanding the holistic impact of a program, unhelpful programs can be cut or revamped.  By segmenting the impact to understand the store/employee characteristics most closely related to greater program success, the right stores and employees can be targeted for the next round of training efforts.

All of which leads to true return on the large investment of taking stores or employees off-line for training.