3 Ways to Grow with Mobile Franchise Operations Software

Using franchise operations software can help you grow your service franchise in a multitude of ways. Here, we focus on three primary ways that software can help enable and streamline your franchise growth.

When we say mobile franchise operations software, we are referring to software tools that are designed specifically for franchises. In this article, we’ll focus specifically on franchises that are mobile. By that, we mean those that perform services at an off-site location like a customer’s home or business.

Even more specifically, these tips are written for decision-makers at the franchisor level, to help them discover opportunities to improve their operations and unlock growth across the whole franchise brand.

1. Automation

At the highest level, a key benefit of any business software is that it promises to automate at least one area of your business. For mobile franchises, there are a number of areas of your business that you wish to automate. Here are just two of the key areas of your franchise that you can automate with franchise operations software, at the franchisor level.

Booking and scheduling

To provide a consistent booking experience at every location, offer an online booking option. Each individual location can set its own availability and allow customers to select appointment times that are convenient to them. The jobs then automatically get assigned to the appropriate technician or team.

On the surface, this sounds simple and it is, but only if your franchise operations software can account for factors like the customer’s location and the specific type of booking. Done right though, this can be a major market differentiator, especially as customers continue to develop higher expectations about convenience.

The key is to invest the time to ensure that you can offer the customer a low-friction experience. For example, if your service involves a quoting process, can a customer complete that online as well? Your investment in making this process as frictionless as possible will pay dividends in the form of overall customer experience.

Pro Tip: One of the ways to improve your booking process is to keep it centralized. If you have one website address and one booking line, you can take some of the burdens of administration away from your franchise partners. At the same time, you can offer a more consistent experience for all of your customers.

Customer Communications

Job booking confirmations, expected arrival times, relevant safety information, job completion notices, invoices, receipts, and follow-up reminders. During the course of any job, there are a number of customer touchpoints that can be automated.

Rather than leave these vital touchpoints to be remembered and carried out by humans each time, automate them and attach them to simple triggers in your process.

For example, when a franchise partner indicates that they are on their way to their next job, the customer receives a message with the expected arrival time. Or when they mark a job complete, the customer receives an invoice. Is payment complete? Send receipt. When you design your systems with automation, there are a lot fewer opportunities for important things to fall through the cracks.

2. The Efficiency of a Connected Team

The best way to support your franchise partners is to give them easy access to the information they need to do their jobs well. That requires that you have franchise operations software that can maintain a record of important customer information. That’s only half of it though. To unlock the real value of that info, it has to be available to the people who need it most — the technicians in the field.

Connecting your entire workforce to the database of information you have about your customers will make them better at their jobs and contribute to their overall job satisfaction. For example, let’s say a team is arriving at a customer’s location to perform a cleaning service. The customer data, available to those team members on their mobile app, can inform them of any specific instructions from the customer about how to access the home, which areas of the house to work on, and what to watch out for.

It will sound like basic common sense to say that it’s important to keep customer records, giving you the ability to learn and adapt to a specific customer’s service preferences over time. It only works if you can connect the team in the field with that customer history, when they need it. Happier team members and customers will lead to more repeat business, greater efficiency and profitability.

3. Leveraging Data to Inform Growth Opportunities

We could have listed this item first. In fact, we probably should have. At the franchisor level, the most important business tool you have to help inform future decision-making is data. Full stop.

Before you invest in franchise operations software tools, conduct an audit of their reporting capabilities. You want to be able to measure the performance of your franchise partners, specific services, promotions, seasonality, and countless other factors. It’s only by recording this data and analyzing it that you can see the trends, good or bad, that represent opportunities for you.

But there’s a catch. For this data utopia to work, you must have each one of those franchise partners using the same software systems, in a connected network. The connected team we talked about above is in fact bi-directional connectivity. The data that your individual technicians or teams collect can be reviewed and parsed by the franchisor. The dream is possible, but it requires a holistic approach to the digital strategy of your entire franchise.

Getting Started with Franchise Operations Software

Naturally, we want you to believe that our franchise management software platform is ideal for your franchise. To help you determine whether that’s the case, follow this short checklist before you start to talk with software vendors about your needs.

• Using some of the examples above as inspiration, make a list of the areas of your operations that you would most like to improve or automate
• Conduct an audit of the tools you have in place (and their associated costs) to manage your operations now.
  Which of those tools can you replace with a purpose-built, customized franchise software platform? Which will have to remain?
• Using your list of “jobs to automate” from the first item on this list, start to look at software vendors who can solve each of those problems for you. What are their limitations? Do they meet the needs of your specific franchise and service type?
• Consider your timelines for a software vendor change. Do you want to conduct a pilot with a smaller number of locations to start?
• Shortlist the vendors who meet your specific criteria and schedule a call to learn more about them

If you’ve made it this far, then by now you’re already realizing that our franchise management software tool can do all of the above and more. Book a free, private demo of Vonigo and we will show you how we meet the needs of franchisors and their individual franchise partners.