Since its founding in 1969, the big idea behind Captain D’s has been to serve high-quality, quick service seafood. More than 30 years later, this big idea has led to the operation of more than 560 restaurants in 22 states—an industry success story.

With success, however, comes a multitude of business challenges, including headquarters-to-restaurant connectivity, essential for employee training, dissemination of best practices, and keeping the “quick” in quick service. That’s why Captain D’s returned to its trusted communications partner, Hughes, to upgrade its existing satellite network to achieve broadband speeds.

Since moving to a HughesNet^® broadband network, Captain D’s has achieved the following key benefits:

• Enhanced customer service
• Higher customer satisfaction scores
• Improved employee training
• Decreased travel costs

Moving to quick-service speed

For years, Captain D’s relied on its legacy satellite network for many of the same applications. However, when the company realized it could achieve even greater productivity by implementing a broadband network to handle its new browser-based applications, vice president of Information Services, Chris Crabtree, called on HNS for a solution.

“The upgrade to broadband was a big decision for us so we devoted a lot of resources to evaluating options and providers,” said Crabtree. “We looked at DSL, cable, satellite, and Frame Relay solutions, but ultimately came back to Hughes based on network performance and HughesNet’s ability to meet all of our business requirements.”

Before selecting Hughes as its broadband partner, Crabtree laid out his business objectives and network criteria. Based on Crabtree’s specifications, the broadband network had to:

• Be replicable at any Captain D’s location, regardless of geography
• Advance the company’s objective to become paperless
• Enable the delivery of companywide training for more than 5,000 employees via the intranet
• Support the chain’s browser-based applications
• Facilitate easy Internet protocol-based monitoring and reporting for each location

Once Captain D’s was ready to proceed, the HNS team installed satellite terminals with small dishes at all the restaurants to enable broadband data communication between headquarters and the stores.

Top-notch training

Delivery of training was a critical factor in Captain D’s decision to upgrade to broadband. Given the varied geographic regions and numerous locations, training programs often arrived late, got lost in transit, or by the time managers could get employees together to administer the training, they were out of date.