Contact Center and Online Booking for Mobile Franchises

For mobile franchises, a contact center is a key differentiator in the value that a Master Franchisor can offer franchisees. With a systematic online booking process, each location can take advantage of the same reliable booking hub. This removes the administration component to allow them to focus on service fulfillment. 

To streamline that process and offer great value to customers and your franchisee, you need the right set of tools and a clear process. Here’s how to manage a contact center with online booking, at the franchisor level. 

 

What is a Mobile Franchise?

Here’s a quick definition. When we say mobile franchise, we mean any franchise that performs a service on-site at a customer’s home or business. The easiest examples are the home services companies that people use every day like junk removal, movers, cleaners, and trades. 

There has been a major trend in the growth of mobile franchises lately. Industries of all kinds are being disrupted by a mixture of mobility and the use of modern, streamlined booking processes. Everything from window cleaning, car detailing, tire changes, to mobile pet care has seen massive growth.

Why use Centralized Online Booking?

Centralized online booking means having a single point of booking, with the franchisor passing the bookings along to the individual locations based on geography. 

The benefits to customers are obvious — a single website name to remember, with the ability to book on one’s own time and at one’s own convenience. The benefits to the franchisee are easy to grasp also. Receiving a flow of booking from the mothership, freeing up time to do the actual work, is much better for productivity and profitability. 

An easy-to-overlook benefit to franchisors is the ability to deliver a consistent, high-quality experience for both of those aforementioned groups. When booking is painless for both customers and service providers, it’s easy to see how it becomes much easier to enable growth and add even more locations.

The Ideal Contact Center 

Your contact center should offer potential customers a number of options to engage with you. An easy to use online booking form, an easy to remember phone number, and a transparent pricing strategy on your website will help a lot with completing booking bookings quickly and painlessly. 

Here are some key components of a contact center with centralized booking for mobile franchises.

Lead with Online Booking

While some customers may still prefer to book over the phone, it’s better to lead with online booking first. Centralized online booking removes any ambiguity from the process and doesn’t require any human effort on the part of your team. Bookings can be made 24/7 and the process is completely scalable. 

The more customers you can get to book online, the lower your customer acquisition costs. It will also reduce errors — customers are far less likely to make errors in recording their address than a phone booking process. 

Automate what you can

When a booking is complete, the job should appear on your franchisee’s calendar and the local locations should be notified. The customer should receive a confirmation email or text message or both, at their own option. 

Reminder emails can be automated as well. These simple automations remove confusion, prevent no-shows, and keep your teams on schedule. 

Call Centers and Phone Bookings

If you accept bookings by phone, have a dedicated line for booking. You’ll also need a tool for distributing calls to your agents. Tools like Sharpen allow you to handle a high volume of calls, share the calls among the whole team, and keep accurate performance data. 

Whether to Chatbot or Not

To help your customers make the decision to book with you, you may need to answer a few questions. You may have a painless booking process and a comprehensive website. Yet your customers will still try to contact you with the usual frequently asked questions you always seem to field. 

Consider deploying a chatbot that is designed to serve answers from your existing knowledge base. With the help of the bot’s scripts, try to encourage website visitors to click through to the booking page. Only when a visitor has stumped your bot does a human have to take over and answer questions live. A bot can “take a message” too if it’s outside of your office hours. Bot tools can make use of macros, surveys, and a number of other ways of serving valuable info to website visitors, quickly. 

Learn more about online booking for mobile franchises

If you’d like to read more about how mobile franchises can use software and automation to grow their businesses, read these five franchise management software mini-case studies. If you want to learn more about how online booking works, read our ebook How Online Booking Can Boost Your Revenue and Profits. or to see how Vonigo’s mobile franchise management tools with centralized online booking can transform your business, book a demo of Vonigo.