I lead the development of an operations manual to codify standards, improve service, and increase productivity. 😉

Content

Problems Auditing Suggestions Leadership Outcomes

Overview

In efforts to franchise the business, the team decided to codify store operations through an operations manual. New to the team, I provided valuable feedback by auditing the current process and sharing my thoughts. I then used my copywriting expertise and analytical thinking to (re)write various parts of the manual. After taking the lead for the project, I delegated each employee to focus on just the part of our operations they were most familiar with. Finally, I reviewed and iterated on the manual by training new hires with the documentation. As a result of this process, we were able to improve our customer service, which increased our 5-star reviews from ~150 to over 500 across multiple platforms. It also decreased the time it took to train new employees from a month to less than a week.

About the company: iSimu VR is Georgia's first and largest VR arcade. It features 12 room-scale virtual reality stations (HTC Vive headsets) and over 40 games and experiences. The company was founded in winter of 2016 and the arcade opened in April of 2017 by three Georgia Tech grad students. I joined the team of 10 people in August of 2017.

Actors: Front-desk employees ("Front Desk Receptionists and Game Assistants")

Locations: The arcade building, the virtual reality station (booth), the virtual reality game launcher, and the website

Props: Virtual reality equipment (HTC Vive headset, controllers, and base stations in a 10x8ft space) and a computer monitor, mouse, and keyboard at each station.

Associates: VR game studios for licensing

Process: Very thin standardized processes in place for customer service, troubleshooting, arcade cleaning and maintenance

Existing Problems - A new company with no documentation

iSimu VR is Georgia's first and largest VR arcade. The most popular arcades across the country franchised early in order to gain brand recognition. We wanted to do the same, and needed to codify our operations to be franchise-ready.

These are the biggest problems we needed to solve:

• It took roughly a month to train new employees due to disparate systems.
• There was no standard way to quickly troubleshoot technical issues.
• Every employee had their own way to interact with customers.
• How to distinguish ourselves from local competitors who all had the same general technology with additional features.