Will my staff actually use it?

Every owner I talk to has a version of the same story. They signed up for some piece of software a few years back, the sort that was going to sort out the training. The owner had a look at it herself, two staff had a look because she stood over them, and nobody has opened it since. The login is on a manager's laptop somewhere. The subscription renews every month, she's been meaning to cancel it for fourteen months, and it's still sitting on the credit card statement.

So when she hears about another tool, the first thing she says is "my staff won't use it." She has a few years of direct evidence and £29 a month going out of her account to prove it. And plenty of owners haven't bought anything at all, just a WhatsApp group and a senior who explains the same thing on a loop, which failed for the same reason before they ever paid for it.

It's the most common objection I get, and the most reasonable one. I want to answer it properly, including the part where I can't.

Why the last one failed

Look at what the tool asks of somebody at the exact moment she needs to know something, which is mid-shift, with a queue building and her hands full. Stop what you're doing, open a different app, work out where the answer lives inside it, and read. That's four steps, and each one is a place to give up.

The specific failure varies by tool. A wiki asks her to browse a page tree. A five-minute YouTube walkthrough means scrubbing back through the whole thing to find step four again. A screen recording somebody dropped in the WhatsApp group on Tuesday is unfindable by Friday, and by then the owner has lost the link too. Different tools, same ending: she guesses, or she texts a senior, or she rings you.

There's usually a quieter problem underneath that one. Most of these tools need somebody to write the content first, and when I ask owners whether they ever did, a fair few admit they got about two procedures in before service got in the way. So the tool that went unused was often half-empty as well, and the staff member who did open it once found nothing about the thing she was actually stuck on. She didn't open it again, which is a reasonable response.

The owner who watched her last attempt sit unused is reading that correctly. It failed.

What I changed

The bit I got wrong for a long time was thinking of this as a content problem. Everything since has been about the fifteen seconds when somebody actually has a question.

So Lattify has no menu to learn. A staff member types the question the way she'd type it into Google. "How do I do a refund." The answer comes back out of your guides, the ones filmed in your venue on your equipment, and she doesn't need to know which guide it was in.

Here's the sort of thing I mean. Saturday at seven, a customer at the bar wants a refund on a card payment from earlier. The bill was split, the card declined on the second item, and the staff member has done this twice before with the senior watching over her shoulder. She types "how do I refund a split card payment" into her phone and gets your own POS procedure back, with the screenshot at step three and the reminder about the manager PIN. The refund goes through. The senior, who's on prep, never comes over.

The other half is WhatsApp, and that's the one for the staff you're actually worried about. There's no app to install and no password, because the advisor is a contact in the phone they already carry, sitting in the same list as their mum and the group chat. They text a question and get an answer from your guides. They can send a voice note instead, which helps when hands are wet or gloved, or a photo, which turns out to matter more than I expected: a new starter often can't search for the thing she's looking at because she doesn't know what it's called yet. So she photographs the dial and asks what it does.

Two guardrails, because they're the first thing owners ask about. It only replies to numbers you've authorised, and it only answers out of your content, so it can't invent a procedure you don't have. When it gets a question it can't answer, you find out, and once you've filmed the guide that covers it, whoever asked gets messaged back with the answer.

If some of your team don't carry phones on shift, the same thing runs on a tablet at the back of house or by the till.

There's a quieter piece too, which is that the guides don't wait to be found. You assign what a new starter needs, it's on her phone from the moment she's on the payroll, and she works through it in her paid induction hours rather than hunting for it later when she's already behind. You can see what she's covered without having to ask her, which sounds like surveillance and in practice mostly stops the awkward conversation where you assume somebody's been shown the close and they haven't.

The half that's yours

None of that works on its own, and this is the part I'd want to know about if I were buying.

The most common way I see a pilot die is the owner answering the 3am pin-code call. Lattify has the pin code. The staff member has Lattify on her phone. The owner picks up anyway, because she always has. Two weeks of that and the staff member has learned that ringing you is faster than searching, adoption flatlines, and the owner concludes they won't use it.

The fix is unglamorous and it takes a few weeks. When the call comes, you say "have you searched it?" If she hasn't, she searches it while you're on the phone, finds it, and the call ends. Next time she goes straight there. You're training a habit by redirecting, and most operators find that harder than anything technical, because they've spent years being the answer to every question and it feels like abandoning people to stop.

A few things help. On day one, do one search together in front of the team so they see the answer come back in your words about your venue. Watch the dashboard once a week rather than once. If somebody's searches are still zero after a fortnight, that's a conversation, not a software fault.

And if you've done all of that and it's still zero at thirty days, the tool isn't your problem. A team that's checked out is telling you something, and no software fixes that.

How you'll know

Try it. Thirty days, no cost, and the dashboard is live from the first morning: which guides got watched and by whom, what got searched, what the advisor got asked, by which person, on which day.

You'll know inside a fortnight. And if nobody's touching it, you'll be able to see whether that's the tool or the redirect, which is worth knowing either way.

That's the answer I'd want if I'd already paid for fourteen months of something nobody opened.