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The franchising industry became extremely popular these days. According to Statista last year around 773,603 franchise establishments appeared in the USA and their estimated economic output was $787.5 billion. These figures are quite impressive, but if you only imagine the enormous number of franchises scattered all over the world you will get even more astonished.
Franchises have always been about brand value and awareness, and of course the supportive relationships between a franchise owners and franchisees. This concept implies that one person establishes a brand trademark or trades business software and the other person has a right to join franchise units and do business under that name and franchise management system. Franchisees are also obliged to pay royalty and make initial fee payments for the right to be a part of the franchise system.
Such cooperation is mutually beneficial for both parties. But it can be quite challenging too, especially when it comes to franchise management. Both franchisors and franchisees have to deal with various productivity problems, control performance of multiple locations, take care of employee engagement, improve profitability, preserve brand standards and manage a lot of things on a daily basis.
So the question is: “What can help franchise companies to improve the performance, daily operations management and become a successful growing businesses?” The answer is: “Custom franchise management software!”
It doesn’t really matter whether you own a franchise or do business under a certain franchise system, you definitely need franchise management solutions. So let’s take a closer look at the most common challenges and see how the right software can help to resolve them.
Top 5 Challenges of Franchise Management
To run and manage a successful business and face all its ups and downs is a hard mission, but it is even harder to be in charge of a franchise management. If you are a franchise owner, you will be highly focused on how your business performs, what franchise marketing campaigns you arrange, what franchise processes should be altered, what staff you are hiring, and what your total operating costs and business incomes are.
For all your franchisees operational challenges become the main area of concern. After all, you have to ensure effective franchise management, the best possible performance rate and follow the high standards of the brand you are working under.
We will get back to the question of the best franchise management software a bit later, but now let’s discuss the key issues you may face and what threats they pose to your business.
#1 Manage routine tasks and franchise operations
If you are in charge of a big team, you need to control numerous processes as well. Otherwise you will lose your time and as a result your franchise productivity will decrease. All companies involved in the supply chain accomplish numerous tasks daily. Your employees need to contact product suppliers, connect directly with your clients, fill in some information, manage orders, send numerous emails, manage online booking. That is a lot of documentation!
So it’s important to ensure that everything is well-organized, structured and located conveniently in one place, so that anyone from your leading managers can easily access the information and:
- perform inventory management;
- deal with performance management;
- reduce manual data entry;
- arrange proper job scheduling;
- make informed decisions;
- generate holistic reports;
- have real time visibility of all numbers and data;
- schedule franchise marketing campaigns;
- organize commission management.
Taking into account a tremendous number of tasks, a centralized single platform is what can become your life saver. Custom franchise management software can help you greatly to deal with all mentioned routine tasks, unload some of your managers, optimize business operations and provide better customer service.
What’s even more crucial, with the custom franchise management software you will be able to reduce paperwork and all your documents will be saved in electronic format. Which makes it easier to access any report or document even if it was created long ago and then archived in the franchise management system.
#2 Communication challenges
In franchise industry communication plays the most crucial part. As a brand owner you should be able to discuss all important details with your franchisees, inform them about all possible changes within the company in time, ask them to provide some reports or check out what their progress is.
At the same time a franchisee may need to ask for approval, consult regarding hiring new staff and training them, inform you – franchisor – about any serious issues. So in any case it is essential to establish an effective communication and always keep in touch. This can be achieved thanks to various messengers, email, video calls, etc. There is possible to implement chatting option in your franchise management software and maybe even spice it up with the chatbots able to answer all frequently asked questions.
#3 Hiring and training new employees
The staff helps every franchise to become better and proceed to growth phases. Your employees deal with your customers and they are the face of your company. So their professional and communication skills influence the whole impression your customers will get after buying at your store. That is why it does not matter whether you are a franchiser or a franchisee, in any case you have to pay special attention to staffing. It may be not so hard to find a responsible employee, but the real challenge is to train them.
The franchise owners should provide employees with various training guides, educational videos, tests and reading materials. Taking into account that franchise stores can be located far from each other (in different cities or even countries), it is necessary to create an app with a set of key features able to provide easy access to all your materials. It is even better to make it a cloud based solution since such software is more secure, easy to update and use on any device.
As to franchisees, their responsibility is to collect the data and send staff reports including the info about newcomers, people who left the company, the progress all employees are making, their productivity and motivation level. This task is quite complex and it also requires a holistic franchise management software.
#4 Timely reporting
As your franchise grows and more franchisees join you, the need to control the productivity of all stores arises. That is exactly when you need to make sure that you receive the most up-to-date reports from your employees and can pull some actionable insights from them.
By monitoring the real performance rate of every store you can find out which one of them is underperforming and needs assistance or change of strategy. To avoid human mistakes and receive more precise numbers, you need to use software tool to collect the data, analyze it and form a holistic report. There are many performance review solutions on the market that can turn your franchise management to a whole new level.
#5 Discovering client needs
Whatever happens, the clients and their satisfaction should be your priority. If you do not understand your customers needs you will likely not succeed. That is why you need reliable custom software. It would be better if you consider building an app using Big Data technology. It will allow you to collect and manage the information about your clients’ preferences, check and analyze their feedback, understand what goods are in demand and which ones you’d better improve or stop supplying.
An application lets you always be visible to your customers, apply your marketing strategy and tricks, provide faster and better client service, improve the engagement and gain your customers’ loyalty. This all leads to better sales cycle and growth of your franchise income.
Must-have franchise management software
As you understood from the above information, franchise management processes can be quite challenging. And if you will not address all issues timely and in a right way your business may face hard times and you definitely don’t want that to happen.
Based on our experience, we can say for sure that all franchising issues and ineffective business operations can be resolved and optimized with the help of the right custom franchise management solutions. We emphasize the necessity of building your own software, because it will be more effective than ready-made solutions. Such software is developed taking into account your specific business needs and aiming to resolve your particular problems. Plus franchise management software will be fully adapted to all your franchise processes letting you make the most out of its use.
So let’s take a closer look at the examples of the most useful solution and find out what franchise operations they can improve in no time.
Mobile application
Nowadays going mobile is the key to success if you have a franchise. Such well-known fast food giants as McDonalds, Burger King, and Dominos Pizza are successfully using applications to allow their customers track an order, customize their choices, receive discounts and benefit from interesting deals. On top of that they actively integrate self-ordering kiosks to provide new restaurant experiences.
Mobile applications allows to understand your target audience better, identify their tastes and form better sales propositions. Moreover, customers can share their honest feedback which is also quite good for a franchise development and growth. Knowing your weak sides you get a chance to turn them into strong ones and change your marketing and sales strategies, improve client service or else.
But not only food industries require an app, there are other business areas that can benefit from it. We have discovered two great examples of franchise management software use and how it improved the business.
Marry Maids – a cleaning services franchise with 40 years of successful experience on the market has gone mobile. They’ve created an application which helped to increase productivity by 20% and reduce time-to-schedule by 40%. The customers now can check at what time their cleaning team will arrive, how much time the cleaning will take and it is also possible to leave a positive feedback or a complaint. This is an example of how positive user experience can be created with the help of an app.
RE/MAX grew up to 3700 in the USA and 4600 outside the country. The success came after this real estate company created an application for searching property. The clients could easily find the houses for sale, can benefit from interactive maps feature, share the information with their family or friends and connect with the professional agent to arrange a house showing.
CRM system
Such a solution will be appreciated by all franchise owners because it allows to automate numerous processes, e.g. you can set CRM to automatically assign the specialists to process customers orders, collect and input clients data automatically, observe performance and sales rates, set important reminders and nurture every customer. Better customer experience can increase the profitability of your company.
CRM also helps your employees score sales leads, perform inventory management, easily manage purchase orders, store all data in one place and utilize analytics to make use out of that data.
Job board
This software helps to optimize recruitment process and post your vacancies more easily and effectively. Thanks to job boards you can add a feature allowing you to set up email alerts, perform easy navigation, implement smart filters and targeted job advertising. This all can help you to attract the most relevant specialists spending less time and resources and control the growth of your team.
LMS
As we’ve mentioned above, every franchisor should think about their employees and provide them with all necessary learning materials. It will be way better to use a custom LMS (learning management system) for this purpose as it will help you to create a holistic method of training and learning. You will be able to create various courses, provide video lectures, observe progress and perform training of your employees easily.
Thanks to the latest technologies such as live streaming, AI and ML, you can make your LMS a one stop solution when it comes to training. Just imagine, all information gathered in one place where it is easy to find and use for learning and improving qualification.
Franchise POS
Point of sale system is number one solution for every modern franchise. Thanks to a wide functionality business owners get a chance to streamline major processes and forget about repetitive routine tasks. Franchise POS grants companies a high level of automation because it can be easily integrated with CRM, ERP, and other important solutions you already have.
When it comes to POS development, our team can be fairly called an expert. We have been helping franchises to develop from scratch and integrate the following:
- Cloud-based POS systems;
- SaaS POS solutions;
- Mobile POS software.
We have also performed POS modernization and integration of third-party services that most companies require but do not know how to implement. Together with our team you can build a point of sale system of any complexity. It takes 3-6 month to build custom POS from scratch and let it work for your business.
Speaking about the feature set every POS for franchise should have, we can help you with implementing the following options:
- shared CRM;
- order management tools;
- inventory management tools;
- payment options;
- reporting and analytic tools;
- loyalty program for customers.
Must-have features all franchise solutions need
In case you’ve made a decision to perform digital transformation of your franchise, then the first thing you should pay attention to is the feature set of the software you are going to develop. It is crucial to integrate the new solution into your existing franchise management system seamlessly. Therefore you need to make sure that everything is in perfect synch. To make the most out of franchise management software solutions, we would recommend you to implement the following features into it:
Also it is preferable to develop cloud-based solution since they are more fast, reliable and let you back up all necessary data and perform inventory management easier. Cloud-based platforms are more powerful and advanced so they will fit perfectly is you own a huge franchise and many employees and managers.
FAQ
To sum it up
Franchise businesses are reaching their peak and digitalization helps it greatly. Franchising has undergone significant changes and nowadays it is hard to imagine a successful company without one of these solutions – mobile application, point of sale system, franchise management software or a convenient and visually appealing website.
The popularity of franchises in undeniable. They invaded the market – starting with fast food restaurants and ending with cleaning and delivery companies. So if you are already involved in this business, software optimization is a must-have for you. By developing franchise management software you can ensure years of successful company performance.