When Trusting the Experts Pays Off Big-Time
Beloved quick service restaurant chain Chick-fil-A has built an industry leading brand on doing what they do best: serving chicken to customers in more than 2,600 restaurants across 47 states, Washington, D.C., Canada and Puerto Rico. Effectively supporting that quantity of restaurants is a challenge that the Georgia-founded company has taken on with tenacity and success, an attitude that has also informed a commitment to innovation in their corporate offices.
Called the Support Center as a reflection of their mission — to support their restaurant operators and employees — the 73-acre complex lies just south of Atlanta and is fitted with state-of-the-art audio-visual (AV) technology that sustains and compliments the backbone of Chick-fil-A’s “connected workplace”.
Just as the company has built success by focusing on their strengths, they have also strategically entrusted their audio-visual technology to the industry experts at AV-Tech Media Solutions. AV-Tech Media Solutions has been a trusted partner of Chick-fil-A since 2004, providing strategic consultation, innovative engineering, high quality implementation, and continuous on-site support that has allowed Chick-fil-A to bring their “connected workplace” vision to fruition. The Support Center has certainly come a long way since the early days of the partnership, when the onsite AV-Tech team set up meetings by rolling TV carts from room-to-room for connectivity.
The Challenge
Since the beginning, Chick-fil-A recognized that the need to interface with employees and restaurant operators, regardless of location, was paramount for a company whose core values include collaboration and teamwork – and they also recognized that they needed to partner with an experienced technology team to carry out that vision. Trusting the experts at AV-Tech has brought results that speak for themselves: these days, the campus boasts fully integrated and intuitive systems that deliver user-friendly and stable experiences.
Chick-fil-A’s status as a leader in implementing cutting-edge technology has been a yearslong strategic goal — in fact, the company was well ahead of the curve in regards to hybrid work. 2008 marked a turning point in their Support Center workspace setup: spurred by the national expansion of their restaurant presence and field operations groups, Chick-fil-A began focusing on and investing in state of the art systems that were designed, engineered, and maintained by AV-Tech. The goal was to implement technology that could connect their employees across time zones and geographic locations to enable a seamless work experience.
Laying an early foundation of company-wide connectivity paid off in spades when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. While many companies were struggling to convert their business to fully-remote work, Chick-fil-A was assessing how to construct the future of hybrid work with AV-Tech’s guidance and consultation. This included developing collaborative meeting rooms that could facilitate multiple platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. It also meant creating stable and user-friendly system infrastructure that can grow with the company, an ongoing and particularly successful initiative made possible by AV-Tech’s commitment to acting as stewards of their partners’ success rather than project contractors.
The Solution
In 2021, AV-Tech was tasked with deploying new technology standards in preparation of the Support Center campus reopening after COVID-19 closures. In the space of just months, nearly 400 meeting environments were gutted of their existing systems and fitted with new state-of-the-art hardware and software solutions to support the newly-needed hybrid functionality. The herculean effort started well before deployment, however: since many of these solutions had never before been used, AV-Tech experts had been working directly with manufacturers on development, testing and vetting in the months prior.
Since the successful return to hybrid work, AV-Tech has been working on their next big project for Chick-fil-A: looking forward to the future of hybrid technology and creating ways to deliver a more immersive hybrid experience as those technologies emerge in the marketplace. There is also a heightened focus on service and support, which means making the experience in every room as stable and user friendly as possible. This is achieved by collecting accurate data to measure how many support ticket requests are true system infrastructure issues versus those that suggest user training or software tweaks.
The plan works like this — an onsite team monitors each room daily, tracking their performance and whether users are encountering any problems. So far, success rates have been astronomical, showing that almost 90% of tickets are attributed to user error or network blip and indicating that the solution itself is incredibly stable.
While the main Support Center is Chick-fil-A’s largest office, AV-Tech also acts as a trusted partner and provides onsite support for the Support Centers in Midtown Atlanta and Irvine, California. No matter where they expand next, AV-Tech is poised to support Chick-fil-A’s impressive growth with equally impressive service and state-of-the-art systems.
The Results
Chick-fil-A reaps the rewards of their proactive approach to AV technology every day, not only from intuitive systems that encourage connectivity but also from their decision to maintain members of the AV-Tech team as daily onsite support. The transition from fully remote work back to hybrid was eased by staff training sessions on the new systems, which are also available regularly as lunch & learns. From daily systems checks to ongoing project planning to troubleshooting, the benefits of having experts just minutes away are undeniable.
The AV-Tech team even collaborated with Chick-fil-A’s internal web and mobile platform to create a searchable list of rooms by size and feature, meaning that any employee can see at a glance what room will work best for their needs. A video conference in a room that can fit 12 with an hour’s notice? No problem – an AV-Tech expert can even meet you there to help get the meeting started.
