Franchise management software, in essence, is meant for managing both franchisors and franchisees. At the same time, it can bring about the management of sales, marketing operations, and branding.
A few challenging influences that the franchise management system can help you tackle include the following.
- The manual handling of many entities
- Inferior reporting capabilities
- Inadequate insight accumulation
- Disconnected and non-integrated franchise business operations
- Impractical, non-realistic budget forecast
Franchise management helps create operational procedures and formulation of guidelines in compliance with agreements consented to by franchisors and franchisees. It empowers franchisors to expand more successfully and efficiently by acquiring new franchisees.
The connection with numerous franchisee locations can be established using integrated communication capabilities that the franchise management software is equipped with.
By closely monitoring the franchisees and their employees, franchise brand owners can monitor their performance by using reports, analytics, and statistics in real-time. This enables franchise owners to heighten productivity. In addition, It helps them gather information about ongoing retail market trends for carrying out research in the future. Franchisees can employ cutting-edge tools put forward by franchise management software to streamline their operations and track outcomes. Also, the tools can furnish necessary reports to the franchisors.
Here’s why it is the perfect tool.
1. It assures brand compliance and consistency
Brand compliance and consistency are critical elements of franchise marketing across multiple channels. Cloud-based franchise management software lets all franchisee locations direct a single message to all.
This message may contain letters and attachments that can easily be accessed using the software. Moreover, the software helps ensure an easily trackable, practical, and user-friendly place to preserve information.
Research indicates that if you maintain a brand identity and compliance, the action can boost revenue by up to 25 per cent. Although franchise companies mostly have well-defined brand guidelines, just 25 per cent of them adhere to the directives. It also permits you to uphold franchise brand identity and renown across the franchise framework.
2. It manages customer relationships
You must put in extra effort to retain your customers, nurture them, and foster brand loyalty. This is determined only by the calibre of customer service your franchisees offer and how far they can go to keep customers. By using a solid franchise CRM, you can boost customer relationship management. The software uses tools such as customer registration, feedback, and loyalty schemes to make customer retention effective.
The principal objective of a franchise management system with CRM is to ensure that components such as sales, sales operations, marketing, and customer support are automated and linked.
The software also ensures all customers are represented and stocked with data such as their previous marketing endeavours and sales. It also helps document all communications and interactions between customers and the franchise business.
3. It offers robust reporting capabilities
It comes up with all-encompassing reporting tools that can be adjusted and implemented.
By the reporting tools, both franchisors and franchisees gain competence in exchanging a broad array of statistics, including sales and marketing insights, customer engagement minutiae, and several other metrics.
Franchise management software with impressive efficacy can generate reports for in-depth analysis. The valuable, relevant insights you gain can help you make well-informed business decisions. For any franchise business, generating and analyzing the following reports are essential.
- Sales activity report
- Sales performance report
- Lead source analysis report
- Profitability report
4. It facilitates process automation
By employing best-in-class franchise management software, you can introduce automation for simplifying the execution of complex procedures. The software performs three salient tasks, namely:
- The centralization of information
- The automation of complicated procedures
- The minimization of labour-intensive manually driven tasks
Franchise firms can benefit from process automation technology through its utilization for improving transparency, streamlining communication, increasing the speed of data processing, and minimizing data loss and errors.
5. It facilitates inventory management
Although a few franchise businesses grapple with properly controlling the inventory structure, a robust franchise management system can be highly advantageous. The software lets you automatically renew your inventory and supply chain and monitor all associated equipment.
Franchise business owners can use this type of software to derive assistance while keeping a close watch on the supply chain, right from the placement of an order to the point of stock replenishment. Thus, with the software in tow, you can anticipate issues beforehand and reduce the odds of any potential shortages or oversupplies. The software allows you to foresee and mitigate risks that have the propensity to crop up during the process.
6. It expedites process management
It comes to your aid as far as the inspection of your franchisee outlets is concerned. Such inspections are done following specific checklists and standards of an audit.
The software can store franchisee outlet-specific historical information, which in turn can be used as a benchmark to inspect and track performance.
Furthermore, when you closely monitor data about sales, employees, performance, inventory, etc., you can remove discrepancies and keep solid control of the functioning of operational processes.
7. It helps amplify sales
This software significantly improves customer satisfaction by simplifying the sales process. Usually, it uses the field service management tool by virtue of which managers get to monitor and offer support to field workers from a remote location and guarantee proper job completion.
Utilizing the tool and ensuring quality assurance, field reps can upload pictures of how they’ve finished a certain job. They can instantly contact support services or gain access to training documents from a digital library via the franchise intranet if any problem arises.
The field service management tool of franchise management software likewise helps quickly respond to customer requests. This is accomplished by the software through instant tracking of the geographical location of the field reps via a centralized dashboard at the time of receiving job orders.
It also helps check the availability of field reps. In this manner, a job can be assigned to the nearest available field rep, thereby reducing the response time. Improved service and prompter response gives rise to more client satisfaction which is reflected in good reviews and added referrals.
8. It ensures employee satisfaction
Sufficient training, support, and open communication are integral to employee satisfaction. Job-related stress is a commonly observed cause of employees being exhausted.
This translates to anxiety centring on the employees’ ability to finish a job within the mandated timeframe. Stress and frustration due to the inability to do a job well resulting from inadequate training or a shortage of resources can be overpowering. On the other hand, employees that are geared up to take on work-related challenges enjoy job satisfaction.
It provides extensive training and support. With accompanying software, you can design digital training courses and upload reference materials on franchise intranet-enabled privately managed digital libraries.
The software facilitates the smooth onboarding of new employees. Once they’re inducted, franchise management software tracks their performance to identify and correct areas of improvement.