Inkling Recognizes Leading Use Cases for Digital Training and Knowledge Solutions for Frontline Workers with 2022 Illuminate Awards

SAN FRANCISCO — December 20th, 2022 — Inkling, a global leader in digital training and knowledge solutions for frontline workers, today announced winners of its 2022 Illuminate Customer Awards. The annual awards recognize organizations for their commitment to innovation, operational agility, and the success of their employees. Winners were honored at Inkling’s annual Illuminate user conference, which was held in Las Vegas, Nevada.

“The winners of this year’s Illuminate Awards are at the forefront of the digital transformation of their companys’ employee experience.   These customers are changing the game by empowering their frontline workers and flipping the training model from teach, study, and test to find, learn and do,” said Mike Parks, CEO of Inkling. “They are eager to explore beyond conventional approaches, bring innovation and enthusiasm to their partnership with Inkling, and enable their employees to learn at the speed of work.  My hope is that all of our customers continue to push Inkling to innovate at pace to solve their critical business challenges and improve employee engagement.”

Winners of the 2022 Inkling Illuminate Awards include:

Jack in the Box – The Ignite Award

The award-winning Jack in the Box team ignited change by speeding up and simplifying content creation and distribution, and making training more engaging for frontline workers. At the same time, managers were able to focus less on training and more on providing a great experience to customers. Prior to Inkling, the team had used a homegrown learning solution that did not integrate content with a learning system. The legacy solution created a great deal of corporate office work that required building out training content and understanding code in order to update the content – a very slow and cumbersome process. Inkling was brought in to deliver more engaging training to frontline workers, while relieving much of the pressure that restaurant managers felt about training and onboarding time. As a result, managers can focus more effort on customer satisfaction.

Abercrombie & Fitch – The Innovation Award

The team at Abercrombie & Fitch broke out of traditional thinking when it discovered that conventional learning systems are great at what they do, but a more agile, knowledge management solution was needed to better enable the company’s retail support call center agents. With Inkling, the team consistently takes a creative approach to supporting call center agents. Ready-to-use customer service responses were developed and added to the Inkling Library so that agents can reference the content as needed when working with customers. Not only have the prepared responses been a tremendous help to the agents, the process is significantly more efficient. In addition, the team has created a Top/Daily Reference Inkdoc that resides in Featured Content, and includes inventory updates, wait times, and other mission-critical updates that agents need to know.

Whole Foods Market – The Impact Award

The Impact Award winner is constantly looking at new ways to leverage the Inkling platform to improve the operational knowledge of more than 100,000 store employees across more than 500 locations. With its implementation of Inkling, and change to training content and processes, Whole Foods Market was able to eliminate 14 minutes of unproductive time per employee, per training engagement, which adds up to millions of dollars a year in labor cost savings. Most recently, the team spearheaded the pilot and evaluation of Learning Pathways to help provide structure to all of the rich content available in its Inkling Library today. With the end user experience always at the forefront, the team at Whole Foods Market was transparent as a partner throughout the process, sharing its assessments with Inkling along the way to facilitate frontline worker success.

G6 Hospitality – The Insight Award

G6 Hospitality earned the Insight Award because it pushes Inkling to stay at the forefront of innovation and improve its product and reporting functionality which has achieved strong usage as a result. The G6 team initially purchased Inkling to replace Cornerstone as its learning management system (LMS). Over the course of the past two years the company has worked extensively with Inkling’s Product and Engineering team to migrate learner data from Tableau into its analytics system. As a result, a large number of reports and dashboards can be built out that track course completions and ensure that employees are in compliance with all local, state and federal regulations. The company has also been a key driver and early adopter of many new Inkling product features including improved field reporting, password resets, distributed user administration, due dates, and certificates of completion.

Popeyes – The Inspire Award

This year’s Inspire Award winner has been focused on addressing ongoing compliance training and communications through Inkling after facing challenges ignited by the pandemic. The Popeyes team recognized that with Inkling, it could deliver real-time information and knowledge to keep employees and customers safe and healthy in its stores and deliver on-demand, up-to-date, and brand-consistent information that enables employees to do their jobs. By using Inkling Habitat for content creation and Inkling Knowledge for content delivery, the team could create, design, and publish content quickly using brand-approved templates and rich media. Within one week of the pandemic outbreak, the company created its first course on Enhanced Covid Procedures (ECP) and released Inkdocs – known internally as standard operating procedures – to all US-based employees in March 2020. Inkling enabled the team to act rapidly from the very beginning and provide communications and information to its stores faster than its competitors and its sister brands in the same company. What took the rest of the industry weeks and even months to achieve was accomplished in just one week.

Orangetheory Fitness – The Inkvangelist Award

The Inkvangelist Award goes to the team at Orangetheory Fitness, which has gone above and beyond as a customer and partner of Inkling. It routinely makes the effort to share how it works with Inkling, other customers, prospects, and the overall market. Not only has Orangetheory Fitness attended conferences with the Inkling team, but it has led breakout sessions with Inkling partners at the ATD Conference, worked with Inkling to submit Brandon Hall HCM Excellence Award applications, completed a customer testimonial video, and had a strong speaking presence at this year’s Illuminate conference. The team is always willing to meet directly with Inkling prospects and customers, making it a true Inkvangelist.

About the Illuminate Customer Awards

The customer award announcements were made during Inkling’s fourth annual Illuminate 2022 user  conference in October. Awards were presented in the following six categories:

• The Ignite Award – A champion of Inkling who sparked a major internal change in their organization by deploying Inkling or expanding its usage.
• The Innovation Award – A creative go-getter who found new and innovative ways to use or apply the Inkling solution to address internal challenges.
• The Impact Award – An achiever who created enormous cultural or monetary value within their organization by implementing and promoting Inkling.
• The Insight Award – An eye-opener who leveraged Inkling Analytics to gain team and organizational insights and used that information to drive business improvements.
• The Inspire Award – A leader whose use of Inkling improves their company, industry, or community in amazing and positive ways.
• The Inkvangelist Award – A motivator who goes above and beyond to share their Inkling story, experiences, and best practices with others, including prospects and other Inkling customers.

About Inkling

Inkling is a learning enablement platform designed for the frontline. Inkling brings together learning and doing to improve the employee experience from day one and every day after that by delivering effortless access to the training and resources they need to be successful in their role.  Inkling enables its customers to meet their employees on the devices they use most, with digitally enabled tools to get work done right, the first time, and improve their customer experience.

Leading brands trust Inkling to help them efficiently onboard employees, ensure continued performance enablement and successfully execute corporate initiatives while providing new levels of visibility into critical operating metrics.  Inkling has earned numerous industry accolades including being named a leader in the Aragon Learning Globe, winning the Aragon Research Innovation Award for Learning two consecutive years, and helping their customers earn more than 50 Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence awards.  Founded in 2009 Inkling is based in San Francisco, Calif.

For more information about Inkling, visit www.inkling.com.

Media Contact

Denise Nelson for Inkling
925.858.5198
denise@cogentacom.com