Success Story

Church’s Chicken Franchise Saves Time With Solink’s Video Surveillance System

February 2, 2023

“The analytics Solink delivers are nothing short of amazing. I can find specific details, check transactions, search events look at graphs in seconds.”

“My other favorite piece is the Discover Feature. To pinpoint outliers and, with a simple click of the mouse, see the video transactions and paper trail associated with that outlier for a store or specific employee. It has freed up so much time for me. Nobody has 2 to 3 hours per day to go through every transaction or drive to each store to review hours of video.” – Chris Alihemmat, Church’s Chicken Franchise Owner.

See how the Solink platform can help with your restaurant.

Time: A Crucial and Rare Ingredient in Food Service

Running a Church’s Chicken Franchise is hard work. When factoring in the handling of operations, maintaining quality and managing staff, it’s easy to understand why there just isn’t enough time in the day for franchisees. But one critical part of Chris’ job that he can’t overlook is maintaining a firm grip on loss and theft prevention. Before discovering Solink, Chris was struggling to manage these types of issues.

“The process was archaic,” he said. “I had to go into the POS (point of sale) website, log onto an e-journal and look at each individual cashier’s series of transactions per store to understand why registers were open. I then had to review funds, discounts, and any other type of suspicious activity.”

If something wasn’t quite right, Chris would have to manually match up the videos with the respective receipts. This involved travelling to each location to view video feeds, as performing such tasks remotely would be nearly impossible. This was due to the fact that remote monitoring meant dealing with jittery, low-quality video, which made, what should have been quick and simple, into a multi-hour chore.

Turning Hours into Seconds

The video surveillance market was developed to help businesses like Church’s Chicken protect against liability to keep pace with technological advances and time pressures means that businesses are often left with countless hours of video, but no time and efficient way to tap into the millisecond information that hides in the hours of tape. Solink changed Chris’ world through the incorporation of a software-based cloud video system that was simple to install, integrated with his existing cameras and POS, was easy to manage and delivered all the analytical data in a user-friendly manner that any franchisee would love. “It has set a very high standard for what apps should really do. The funny thing is, my dad is 60 and still involved with the business. He knows little about computers, but with the Solink app he doesn’t need to. He gets all the data he needs on his phone, and for me, I simply grab the information and video clip I need and text or email it to anyone within seconds.”

See how Solink will help save you time.

Delivering Highly Efficient Support

The installation process was simple enough that Solink’s 24/7 support wasn’t even needed. “I did it myself,” said Chris. “Anyone who can hook up a television can hook up Solink.” When he needs it, Chris is consistently impressed by how the Solink solution and support team are there to deliver peace of mind. “It is one of the best customer service teams I can name. Within 2 minutes, each time I need them, they are there.”

What Chris ultimately found was that once the cloud video surveillance system was in place and he knew that Solink’s support team had his back, he didn’t need to micromanage every transaction. “It certainly changed my perspective on the operation of the restaurant and how things could now run so much more efficiently.”

Church’s Chicken and the Future

With such important details readily available at his fingertips, Chris can now spend his new found time improving his sixteen restaurants and creating a great environment his customers love to return to time and time again. “With this free time now available to me, I can put it into the restaurants, take the time to hire more good people, update the look of our locations and spend more time actually operating the business. What’s more, we can more easily look at expanding further across Ohio without geographical constraints to deliver what we feel is still the best darn chicken in the world!”