A safe return program for customer-facing industries

Restaurants, cafés, hotels, and retail stores that have remained closed for months because of coronavirus continue to monitor infection figures in the country, anticipating the possible easing of quarantine measures. This could mean a gradual reopening of commerce. But while the virus remains an ongoing threat, they will need to adapt and resume operations while taking precautions to prevent its spread, and give customers confidence in a safe return.

With this goal, we launched a post-pandemic safe return program for restaurants, cafés, hotels, and retail businesses. It is based on official information from the World Health Organization, the Chilean Ministry of Health, and industry-specific recommendations from the National Retail Federation, an association representing retailers, wholesalers, restaurant chains, and online retailers in the United States and more than 45 countries.

The Safe Return program consists of a series of microcourses designed for frontline employees, including cashiers, waitstaff, store employees, hotel staff, and other customer-facing roles. They provide guidance for COVID-19 training efforts.

Employees need to understand safety and hygiene measures in the kitchen and when dealing with customers, including sanitizing facilities, food-handling protocols, and the safe exchange of objects.

The content has therefore been developed to be straightforward and easy for these employees to understand, supporting strong learning outcomes through our Closelly platform.

Employees can access it anytime from their mobile phones. It offers an ecosystem of features designed to support successful training, including microlearning, gamification, social learning, direct communication, and user segmentation. The platform improves the employee experience and reduces the usual resistance to training.

Rebuilding trust

Taking the necessary precautions to prevent infection while serving customers will be essential—not only for restaurants and cafés to resume normal operations, but also for employees and customers to trust that reopening is safe.

The same applies to retail, where frequent contact between different customers and objects or products, together with high foot traffic in shopping centers, led stores to close early.

Although online sales offered some relief for retail, restoring customer confidence will be essential to bringing people back into stores. For hotels, reassuring guests will help reactivate one of the industries hardest hit by the pandemic.

Closelly is a pioneer in agile mobile microlearning. It enables training programs to be implemented four times faster than traditional e-learning and dramatically improves training outcomes by fitting into the normal flow of work and using leading digital motivation techniques and mobile technology.

Companies using Closelly improve training outcomes for their teams and subsidiaries, regardless of location or working hours. They achieve completion rates close to 100% and improve long-term retention.