In recent times, huge growth in the number of franchises has been observed. The majority of these franchises are in ownership of multiple franchise outlets spread across more than a single franchise location. The multi-unit franchise can be either a franchise owner that has at least two well-managed locations in its possession or a large investment group having ownership in excess of 100 locations scattered across multiple towns/cities. Embarking on and launching a multi-unit franchise can be highly advantageous as it opens up several opportunities for excellent business growth and wealth creation using franchise CRM software. As applies to every business decision, the handling of a multi-unit franchise involves lots of money and control. If you’re the owner of a franchise that has its operation from a retail point of view, you can make tremendous headway in growth and development. Adding more locations will add more value to your business. Franchise owners with large-scale franchises can likewise diversify across various locations to improve their market positioning and stand firm against an economic downturn.
Managing the customer service of a multi-unit franchise can be an extremely challenging task. Slight mismanagements have the potential to make things go haywire. Therefore, you must ensure the customer service process in place is streamlined. This can lead to significant time saving for your sales reps. With franchise CRM put into practice, you can elevate your marketing campaigns to greater heights with ads that are personalized to meet customers’ unique needs.
The approach of implementing franchise CRM software is adopted to manage the customer interactions of the multi-unit franchise by resorting to data analysis with a view to making business relationships better, increasing customer retention, and eventually driving sales growth.
Franchise software is a fusion of internet-driven methodologies that are exploited by a multi-unit franchise for the achievement of its goals by identifying and fulfilling the stated and unstated wants and needs of customers.
Franchise CRM software comes to the aid of multi-unit franchise owners by storing data and all correspondences arising out of interactions and the exchange of information from both potential customers and existing ones. The software also attends to managing the customer life cycle by helping in dealing with inquiries, needs, preferences, service delivery, reviews, and support.
Do multi-unit franchises need franchise CRM software?
It’s imperative to maintain good customer relationships for businesses to survive in the long term. To make this intent more effective, franchise CRM software is put into action. When it comes to small businesses, it’s still possible to handle customer relations by asking use of Excel/Google spreadsheets. But the process can be extremely time-consuming and haphazard. And, for multi-unit franchises, running the brand out of simple spreadsheets is a next-to-impossible task. Eventually, only franchise owners can decide the exact needs of their franchises. But, the fact of the matter is, that they can considerably benefit from the numerous advantages of using franchise CRM software.
How do multi-unit franchises benefit from franchise CRM software?
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Franchise CRM software delivers a superior customer experience.
Knowing the prospects well allows franchise owners to personalize their messages and add extra value to the service from the beginning. Franchise CRM software facilitates easy tracking of all prospects in terms of many details such as contact, and personal and communication history. This information can be leveraged by franchise owners to create engaging messages for attracting prospects and leads and successfully leading them to conversion.
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Franchise CRM software results in higher productivity.
In multi-unit franchisees, the software helps sales reps by removing the burden of mundane data entry jobs from them. It also helps them by eliminating several different low-value administrative busywork. As a consequence sales reps get additional time to interact extensively with prospects. With franchise software in tow, extracting vital information becomes much easier. The information is related to communications that take place between sales reps and prospects/leads prior to, in the midst of, or following client calls. This leads to substantial time saving adding up to labor hours in the order of months in the long term.
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Franchise CRM software gives rise to heightened collaboration.
One of the biggest plus points of franchise CRM software is the fact that customization can be done so that various departments are facilitated to carry out seamless interaction and communication with one another for closing sale deals, finishing projects, or getting to the bottom of customer issues and resolving them. All these actions can be accomplished through the distribution of appropriate documents with the help of cloud-based directories/folders or a privately managed franchisee intranet. Furthermore, franchise CRM helps establish uninterrupted chat sessions for effortless collaborations in real time. As a result, the software also makes it simpler for sales reps to disseminate franchise-adopted best practices or make necessary adjustments during the time a colleague falls ill or goes on a holiday.
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Franchise CRM software renders profound insights.
In a multi-unit franchise, both franchisors and franchisees benefit from acquiring valuable insights from the resident franchise CRM software. These insights are in the form of vital data concerning sales rep performance, conversion rates on a team and an individual basis, average sale deal size, red-flag generating problems involving the sales cycle, average sale deal velocity, etc. In simple words franchise CRM software allows multi-unit franchise owners to recognize the strengths of their businesses and the efficiency of sales reps at one glance. These insights are key to franchises in a fiercely competitive scenario that help them in identifying leaks in productivity and adding polish to defined sales processes and offered customer service.
Top-of-the-range franchise CRM software features for multi-unit franchise owners
Best-in-class franchise CRM software eventually pays for itself by amassing profits over time and breaking even. Some of the notable features a typical franchise CRM software offers include the following.
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Franchise intranet
Franchise CRM software comes up with a private intranet that allows users to properly align crucial elements of systems, documentation, messaging, and support. The intranet facilitates the storage of important minutiae such as customer contact details, correspondence history, and several other insights in digital libraries so that the information can be disseminated, third-party applications seamlessly integrated, and simple collaboration established. What’s the alternative? Manual tracking of who is in charge of what, exchange of documents via emails back and forth, and keeping in mind what brand materials are updated and how – an absolute inconvenience.
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Interactive help desk
In a multi-unit franchise, the back-end operations need to run things smoothly as far as customer perspective is concerned thereby diminishing the likelihood of support from franchisees back and forth for speedy interactions, resolution of queries, and hitch-free movement of leads all through different stages of the sales cycle. Franchise CRM software comes up with a help desk that has the ability to search trouble tickets raised by customers through service support, FAQs, and a variety of discussion forums among other provisions.
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Tasks and events scheduling
Franchise CRM software is integrated with the feature of scheduling tasks and events related to works that are in progress. At the same time, the feature triggers automated reminders to ensure ground-level workers carry out their jobs on schedule.
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Invoice generation and processing of payments
This feature of franchise CRM software facilitates the generation of customer invoices and statements with its built-in payment processing tools against invoices. Furthermore, the feature does underlie interfacing with leading payment gateways like Authorize net for processing credit card payments and streamlined revenue reporting workflow.
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Mobile competencies
The whole lot of things done by franchise CRM software must also be carried out from internet-driven mobile devices. Top-notch franchise software allows for managing and sustaining customer relations throughout the franchise from the palm of a hand.
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Manifold communication channels that can be operated and controlled from a centralized UI
Franchise CRM software enables multi-unit franchise owners to send emails, text messages, chat messages, and internal memos to anyone in their business contacts. All of these can be done from a single comprehensive dashboard. Consequently, they’ll be able to satisfy both prospects and existing customers from their mobile devices and as per demands. Questions can be properly answered or valuable information can be timely shared through the preferred medium of communication chosen by leads or customers.
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