2012–2020
TeamKFC: a portal organized around what restaurant teams need, not who owns it
TeamKFC is where KFC’s US franchisees, restaurant general managers and team members find the standards, training and news they need to run a restaurant, often from a small computer in the back office. Over eight years we rebuilt it around them: one login and standards as pages instead of PDFs in 2013, then a structure organized by topic rather than by department, completed in 2019, which won four industry awards.
- 4
- industry awards for the 2019 redesign: 2 Gold MarCom, Ragan, IABC Gold Quill
- 125,000
- US team members the portal serves (per KFC, 2018)
- 4,062
- US restaurants (per KFC, 2018)
Schematic — client UI under NDA
- Client
- KFC
- Industry
- Food & Beverage
- Scope
- User research · Information architecture · Portal design and build · Search · Analytics · Managed support
- Platform
- IBM WebSphere Portal + Web Content Manager
- Partnership
- 2012–2020
Challenge
A KFC restaurant general manager runs the shift, the staffing and the numbers, and reaches TeamKFC from a small computer in the back of the restaurant, over the restaurant’s own connection. Every week many print “What’s Important Now”, a one-page bulletin, and post it on the back-of-house board for the shift huddle; it was the most searched term on the portal, 13% of 68,577 searches in 2016–2017. Franchisees and area coaches sign in daily for reports and forms, and team members come for their onboarding training, in a business where KFC estimated its US turnover at up to 200% a year (per KFC, 2019).
In 2012 KFC described its intranet as “out-dated” and “ridden with counter intuitive PDF content”, with separate logins for the other tools restaurant teams used. By 2017 it had grown again. People at every level told us there was too much information, some of it duplicated or out of date: “it gets hard to trust the information,” a general manager said. Search returned different results for “cole slaw” and “Coleslaw”, and some users left the portal feeling overwhelmed. “You have to speed us up.”
Approach
Designed with the people who run the restaurants
The first redesign began in 2012 with a workshop at KFC in Louisville that included a roundtable of franchisees, and card sorts with restaurant general managers and above-restaurant leaders. One principle came out of it and held for eight years: people do not care which department owns a piece of content, so the portal is organized by type and topic, not by owner.
One login, standards as pages
The relaunched TeamKFC went live in December 2013, “redesigned for you, by you”, as KFC told its restaurants. A single sign-on took managers into the learning and customer-feedback tools without logging in again, the tools they used most sat on one dashboard, and KFC’s standards became pages linked to their related resources instead of PDFs. Any page could be printed or shared as a direct link. The same year we built iPad apps for restaurant teams, fed from the same content.
Listening again
In 2017 a four-week health check brought us back to people at every level, from franchisees to general managers and area coaches, and to a year of search logs. It showed where the portal had drifted: content scattered across departments, search that failed on spelling, and a site slow on restaurant connections.
One place for each topic
In 2018 and 2019 we reorganized TeamKFC around topics rather than departments, so a single page brings together the standards, operations, training, communications and marketing for that subject. With it came a mobile-first design matching KFC’s refreshed brand, built on our Portal Blueprint component framework, a new authoring workflow and governance so each topic keeps one source of truth. The redesign was completed in May 2019.
Staying with it
Between the redesigns we supported the portal year after year, moved its search to the platform’s own engine with the WebSphere 9 upgrade, researched the team-member experience in an industry of high turnover, and set up the analytics that show authors what people actually read.
Impact
After the 2013 relaunch, one franchise owner wrote to KFC’s communications team:
“If there is anything that gives me faith in our brand, it is how this website functions as an incredibly organized resource of information. I am SO IMPRESSED. As a franchisee, I feel that my effectiveness as a leader has just improved 1000%.”
The 2019 redesign won two Gold MarCom Awards (2019), Best Intranet Design in Ragan’s Employee Communications Awards (announced February 2020), which singled out an information architecture “based on the information employees needed”, not on the department that owned it, and an Award of Excellence in IABC’s Gold Quill Awards (2020). TeamKFC serves KFC’s 4,062 US restaurants and their 125,000 team members, with about 12,000 pieces of content (per KFC, 2018).
We designed and built both versions with KFC’s communications team and Yum! Brands IT, and supported the portal from 2014 to 2020.