Modern Learning Content Helps Whataburger Compete for Consumers

For more than seven decades, Whataburger has been committed to serving up quality burgers made-to-order along with a side helping of exceptional customer service. That commitment has led to fans who frequent Whataburger’s 1,050-plus restaurants across 16 states. It has also helped the company to build systemwide revenue of more than $4 billion each year.

To ensure a consistent, high-quality experience at all of its locations, Whataburger delivers a range of courses to employees—from food preparation and customer service to restaurant management and operations. Recently, the company turned to MadCap Create and Syndicate to modernize its learning content development and delivery.

Fast Food is Now a Luxury

The days when fast-food restaurants primarily served as a source of inexpensive meals are over. In the wake of rising prices, 78% of consumers now view fast food as a luxury, according to a 2024 LendingTree survey. Notably, 46% of survey respondents report that costs at fast-food restaurants are similar to those at their local sit-down restaurants, and 22% say fast food is actually more expensive.

Fast-food restaurants like Whataburger, which have always prioritized freshly prepared meals, quality ingredients, and superior service, have an advantage in courting consumers. However, maintaining that advantage means continually updating offerings and best practices—and ensuring employees have the knowledge to act on those updates.

Challenge: Deliver Courses Quickly and Consistently

Training has always been an important part of Whataburger’s commitment to ensuring a consistent, quality consumer experience across its corporate stores and franchises.

For years however, much of the learning content was delivered as printed manuals. As a result, the instructional design team had to publish new documents every time there were updates—a time-consuming and expensive process. As Whataburger’s growth continued to accelerate, it became increasingly difficult for the team to keep pace with demands to deliver new information.

Complicating matters further, instructional content was maintained in a company-wide system. This made it difficult for employees to search for and find the exact documents they needed when they needed them.

Whataburger realized that it needed to move to a modern, digital platform that would streamline content creation and delivery. Additionally, the team wanted to facilitate access, improve control over course content, and allow employees to learn at their own pace. After evaluating different industry solutions, Whataburger chose MadCap Create and Syndicate.

New Content Platform Drives Employee Productivity and Engagement

With assistance from MadCap Create and Syndicate professionals, Whataburger has set up a digital platform designed to serve as the foundation of its learning ecosystem and migrated all existing learning content over to the platform. Now instructional content is created and updated using MadCap Create, a learning content management system (LCMS). Then it is delivered via MadCap Syndicate, which also pushes content out to the restaurant chain’s learning management system (LMS).

With its initial deployment in place, the instructional design team is already realizing increased productivity, efficiency and cost-savings. For example, MadCap Create and Syndicate can consolidate content from franchises versus corporate stores as well as based on region, providing a huge time savings. Additionally, the move from print to digital delivery means new manuals can be quickly downloaded to both company and franchise restaurants, eliminating the previously associated printing costs.

At the same time, a priority has been delivering information to the company’s operations leadership. Now with the digital platform, the instructional design team can put training materials at the fingertips of new managers and leaders through their laptops, mobile phones, and the tablets that Whataburger has invested in providing all stores. So, it is easier than ever for these employees to access and engage with the company’s learning content.

Looking Ahead

Beyond the initial benefits that Whataburger has seen since migrating to MadCap Create and Syndicate, the company also sees an opportunity to:

• Foster employee and customer satisfaction by creating a better learner experience that lets employees take a self-paced approach to acquiring the information and skills needed for their jobs.
• Support future expansion by leveraging the scalability of MadCap Software to support aggressive growth and training initiatives for new stores.
• Mitigate risk by ensuring the right content is reaching the right audience. Having an audit trail of who changed or consumed content is critical to mitigating Whataburger’s risk for on-the-job training aid.
• Minimize the need to add headcount and bring outsourced projects in-house, since the company can increase team efficiencies in creating and delivering learning content while decreasing the required maintenance.

Additionally, productivity gains and efficiencies at Whataburger will enable the instructional design team to focus on strategic initiatives that the company has identified. These include an operations learning library, introductory videos, the use of QR codes to easily access information, and a station master program. Using MadCap Software to digitize many previously manual processes, the possibilities are almost limitless.