Blimpie is literally taking it to the streets.
The sandwich chain has launched six hospitality vans that are traveling through every Blimpie market in America for a six-month tour. The tour will cover more than 20,000 miles and personally train more than 8,500 Blimpie front-line employees in all of the company’s nearly 1,800 locations in the lower 48 states.
The purpose of the tour, according to the company, is to provide each employee with specialized training in Blimpie hospitality — the cornerstone of the “New Blimpie,” president and CEO Jeffrey K. Endervelt said in a release.
“Providing our customers with our own special brand of hospitality is the cornerstone of the new Blimpie — not a buzzword, not a concept, but a core principle,” said Endervelt. “This is a major undertaking and use of resources, but it is only through personalized, face-to-face training that we are going to be able to institute and maintain the level of hospitality that we demand.”
Each Hospitality Van features special graphics and is manned by a specially trained Blimpie “hospitality ambassador.” Each van also distributes training materials to support the sessions at each location.
Since the tour launched in February, more than 250 franchisees and hundreds of front-line employees have completed the hospitality program and received certification.