How to Improve Your Mobile Franchise Management Systems (with Checklists)

A franchise is only as good as its systems. If you’re looking for ideas about how to improve your mobile franchise management systems, this article will give you some action steps to follow. 

The true value of what you are offering your franchise partners is in your operations and processes. As a franchisor, it’s up to you to monitor the activities and results of the entire organization and incorporate your learnings into your operations. Your franchise is an evolving entity that can be constantly improving its best practices. 

For each area of your business, we have outlined some ideas for how to improve, as well as a checklist of actions. 

Marketing and Advertising 

Marketing and advertising are two areas where you can provide a lot of value to your franchise partners. Establish marketing systems and content that can be shared by all of your locations. It will help you gain a lot of reach in those individual markets.

If you don’t already have marketing and ads systems in place, or if your systems could use a refresher, review this list of tactics and see if there are any improvements you can make to offer more value to your franchisees. 

• Consider ways to automate your process of asking for reviews
• Share and publish localized reviews with franchise partners
• Create a brand-wide email newsletter 
• Create customer-centric email content for existing customers 
• Generate social media content for franchisees to share
• Make video script templates for localized promotional videos
• Create marketing tips updates to share with franchisees
• Establish social media workflows so franchisees can create their own content (e.g. Before/Afters)

Hiring 

When it comes to hiring, your franchisees will want to make their own hiring decisions but there is still plenty you can do to help them find quality candidates. Everything from offering them pre-written job ads, to helping them distribute their job posts can help a lot.

Think about the kinds of things that new hires will appreciate. For example, the autonomy of life on the road might appeal to some. Do you offer paid time off, instant access to pay, or any other perks that can help your locations attract and hire new team members? 

Jordan Tait, a Partner and Business Coach at Trailblaze Partners, has this advice:

The Franchisor can create the tools and provide the support to improve recruiting results, but it’s ultimately up to the franchisee to execute. Therefore, the more plug-and-play the franchisor systems are, the better.

The way I see it, the most value the Franchisor can add is in investing in developing employment branding that can be utilized by the franchisees. Including employee photos, videos, a career landing page on the website, and social media content.

All these recruitment marketing tools benefit the franchisees, who could not otherwise afford the time or money to create them for their individual locations.

• Establish a list of job perks and benefits for all locations
• Develop employment branding assets (photos, videos, career page, social media content)
• Share well-written job ads for each company role
• Assist your franchisees with localized job ads and hiring practices
• Write a new hire training manual (make them specific to the job role) 
• Create employee codes of conduct 

Job Booking 

If you are not handling centralized job booking already, perhaps it’s time to reconsider. By handling job booking from headquarters, you can eliminate a lot of overhead and administration for your franchise partners. What’s more, you can also provide a consistent level of service to end customers of your brand. 

To do this well, you need franchise management software that has the ability to accept bookings by geography and dispatch those jobs to the appropriate location. This will also give you an accurate, real-time picture of the performance of each location and help you identify ways to help your locations grow. 

• Use a centralized booking system (online and phone booking)
• Let franchise partners set their own availability and operating hours
• Offer end customers online quotes and estimates
• Send automatic job booking confirmations to franchise partners and end customers

Scheduling 

Once a job is booked, your franchise partners have to determine which of their teams will handle it. They will also have to track the job through to completion. Once again, franchise management software designed specifically for mobile franchises will be a big help. 

You can make this easy for your locations with the right tools and maintain visibility from your franchisor dashboard. 

• Set availability and services based on ZIP codes
• Dispatch calls to franchise owners and their entire team via mobile app

Communications

When a job is booked, the customer should receive a notification. Once a team is en route to complete that job, again the customer should be notified. When the job is completed they should hear from you again to confirm that it’s done. 

Manually sending these messages can create an administrative burden. Automate them so that they send when your teams indicate that they are ready. Ideally, they’re time-based or can be triggered by a simple tap in an app.

• Create automated messages for when a job is booked
• Connect your job booking software with automated messages that indicate when teams are arriving
• Allow teams to “clock out” when a job is done and trigger a message to customers (can contain an invoice as well) 

Billing and Payments

Cash flow is important to your entire organization and especially to your individual franchise owners. Reduce as much friction as possible from the payments process by automating invoices and creating the ability to accept payments on site. 

The easier making a payment is for your customers, the faster you get your payment. If there is one business process that is worth automating, it’s payments. 

• Automate your invoicing process so that they are sent immediately upon job completion
• Offer your franchisees the ability to accept payments on-site or online
• Automate the sending of payment confirmations to your franchise partners and end customers

Tools for Franchise Management Systems 

Vonigo’s mobile franchise management software makes it easy to handle centralized job booking, scheduling, customer communications, billing and payments. 

Ask us how you can offer more value to your franchise partners and enable more growth by owning and automating many of the processes that take time away from the profitable work — actually completing jobs. To learn more about how to use these franchise management systems in your business, book a free, private demo of Vonigo.