Practically, it’s impossible on the part of a franchisor to be in charge of an entire franchise family in the absence of franchise software. Best-in-class franchise software is endowed with all features that any traditional retail software has to offer. What’s more franchise software owns dedicated features such as onboarding across multiple site locations, communications, performance monitoring, reporting and analytics, and training and support. In addition franchise software comes up with a plethora of marketing solutions and lead-generation tools. It offers tons of value with seamless scalability regardless of whether you’re a franchisor with a single unit or multiple units franchise owner.

Read on to gain an understanding of how to franchise software is a cut above the rest when it comes to helping franchisors in their pursuit to slip into both new, unexplored markets and existing markets and expand their business.

Why as a franchisor would you invest in franchise software in 2022?

Because:

• It optimizes your inventory and supply chain by allowing you to gain visibility of the stock in hand right from the corporate level. The software helps you fix maximum and minimum inventory levels. It also helps you to directly associate with your supply chain for placing automated purchase orders. Franchise software is outfitted with an automatically functioning stock replenishment tool to carry out analysis using seasonal trends and historical data so that shortages or oversupplies if any can be averted and spikes or falls in demand can be adjusted.

• It aims at making customer service better with the inclusion of a distinct customer management module that facilitates the smooth conversion of leads/prospects into paying customers, establishes streamlined communication with every business party, executes the scheduling of jobs in a single click, intuitively generates invoices and processes statements, automatically keeps records of all customer-specific correspondence in reserve, produces comprehensive informative reports with reference to customer service operations, and many more. All these functionalities unify to bring about overarching improvement in customer experience and satisfaction thereby leading to an increase in sales, favorable reviews, and referrals for your franchise brand.

• It helps in improving the techniques adopted to inspect franchise operations and ensure they’re adhering to norms and standards. Franchise software allows you to keep track of individual franchisees and that too in real-time. A franchisor can instantly gain access to performance metrics regarding sales, marketing, and supply chain and draw comparisons between franchisees. This can be carried out remotely from all kinds of mobile devices without having to pay a visit to franchisee locations in person. Thus, franchise software sees to it that franchisors are granted more control to check brand performance short of giving a feeling franchisees that they’re being closely followed and constantly checked. And, in the event problems happen, the solution is readily available wherein you can use your mobile device to directly get to franchisees, ask for relevant data or clarifications, and hand down appropriate training materials then and there. The software finally lets you monitor the progress made by franchisees in gaining knowledge from all assigned training materials.

• It brings off the coordination needed to create powerful marketing campaigns by enabling franchisees to carry out marketing endeavors within their limited scope. This helps make them more independent and flexible. Franchise software facilitates the easy distribution of the schematics of such limited-scale individual marketing campaigns so that the whole family can espouse and enhance the applied strategies and tweak them further for more gainful results. More importantly, franchise software lets you automatically collect all key performance indicators KPIs and compile them in regularly published reports. The KPIs can further be used to detect campaigns that have the potential to bring about more cost efficiency.

• It helps in the generation of more sales with the help of built-in, specialized sales promotion and customer loyalty tools that facilitate bringing in more and more customers to franchisee outlets. Moreover, there are lead management tools aimed at helping out franchisors keen on developing their brand by ushering in new candidates as prospects and making them move forward through the various stages of the sales cycle until conversion.

• It helps reduce the burden of low-value, repetitive administrative redundancies that occur in every business starting from labor-intensive data entry jobs to manual extraction of reports and dashboards. The design of franchise software is brought into being to put up a fight against tasks that don’t yield profits or financial gains and unnecessarily bog down business owners. The software is aimed at carrying out automated execution of the following duties.

  • Automatic generation of reports

  • Integration of software across multiple platforms

  • Automatic triggering of email campaigns

  • Movement of prospects through various stages of the sales cycle

Read on further to learn about 4 key franchise software features that franchisors can maximally utilize to strengthen business prospects.

1. Automated workflows

It’s one of the principal unique selling points of franchise software and well deservingly so. Workflow automation leads to the smooth functioning of frequently recurring tasks such as:

• Sending out introductory emails to new franchisees

• Maintaining updated for support tickets that are being raised

• Frequent data entry jobs

Thus franchise software is able to relieve employees and franchisees with sizable time to focus more on core responsibilities and sales closure and brand development. Not only does this make better utilization of the time of your employees but also heightens morale and involvement because everyone’s work becomes intrinsically more engaging when they concentrate on high-value tasks. Instead of manually entering the contact details throughout the day, it’s more worthwhile to interact with people and solve problems.

Franchise software allows you in designing and implementing customized workflows that fulfill your unique business needs. It helps you do mapping of processes and setting triggers to automatically roll out the red carpet for new leads, keep contact details up to date, generate reports and dashboards, and be in control of several other mundane administrative tasks to be converted into independently running operations. Franchise software exhibits full compatibility with all kinds of business models that allude to reasonable control by end-users.

2. Source tracking

It’s all-important to track the source from where your leads obtained information about your brand. This is because it has a direct impact on the decisions you make depending on the performance of your marketing campaigns. If you’re not aware of the source of your leads it means you’re simply wasting the capital reserved for marketing campaigns.

In particular, source tracking is important due to the reason that the majority of franchisors run several campaigns related to lead generation across more than one platform, and that too at the same time. Any software lacking source tracking abilities is useless as the main intent and strategy become impractical under such a circumstance.

Every time a new lead is inputted within the system either automatically or manually franchise software puts a tag on its source instantly. From a centralized directory, you can look for leads and sort them by source. This provides an effective assessment of the upshots of your marketing campaigns at a glance.

3. Integration

Franchise software is built to provide overarching compatibility with any business model. Partly, it refers to significant control by end-users and capabilities to customize. And, partly it hints at the importance of software integration.

The fact of the matter is, that all franchisors employ different tools simultaneously. Best-in-class franchise software offers smooth compatibility with others. It helps increase the efficiency of your existing software by getting all scattered data organized at a centrally managed location. The franchise software solution is designed so that other software like QuickBooks, Intuit, Authorize.net, DocuSign, and many more can be seamlessly incorporated into its fold.

4. Centralized communications

In the present digital age, scores of ways prevail to reach out to someone. For instance, you may need to inform an employee about a change in an appointment for a certain client. The information can be passed on using a phone call, sending an email or a text message, pinging via WhatsApp, or setting up a face-to-face call on Facetime or Skype. The options are unlimited and reliable. But there’s a flip side to it as well.

As the number of communication channels increases, the odds of messages being missed or overlooked increase too. For a few people frequently checking emails is a habit. But for others, it can be a chore once in a while. People prefer different media for communication. And choosing the wrong medium can result in costly missed opportunities. In the specified example, it will possibly mean a trip gone waste for the employee as had he received the message, could’ve moved to attend a different appointment and completed the job there.

So, how to make sure such lost opportunities are minimized? Franchise software centralizes communications across the board. This means you can contact any employee through all communications channels supported by the software’s underlying platform. Not only does this give rise to improved communication but also heightens employee accountability. When every communication is channelized via franchise software there’s barely any chance of excuses for missing any memos.

5. Reporting and analytics

Every top-of-the-line franchise software is endowed with impressive reporting and analytics capabilities. To ensure, you maintain a steady competitive advantage in 2022, the need to continuously bring out valuable insights concerning workflows, campaigns, lead sources, sales funnels, performance, and communication channels becomes crucial. And, as a franchisor it’s not possible to optimally develop your brand unless you keep track of the rate at which your target audience is attracted, qualified leads are converted, and financial goals are met.

All these objectives can be fulfilled when you install franchise software and put it into action. The reporting standard exhibited by franchise software is exemplary. The huge number of hours you’d have spent scrutinizing various franchise outlets, collating, and cross-referencing is minimized as all the work is done by the software. Franchise software is capable of automatically generating reports that bring key performance indicators and KPIs to light. It also makes business-relevant opportunities and threats plain. The insights are automatically delivered to your email in accordance with the periodicity you set. Additionally, franchise software displays a compelling, informative dashboard that allows you to monitor marketing campaign results, the status of leads in the sales cycle, and individual franchise outlet performance in real time.

6. Onboarding

Franchise software sets the seal on pulling off an efficient onboarding process by enabling you with the jobs of creation, assignment, and monitoring of custom training resources. You’re allowed to have all guides and manuals shared with a private intranet library for straightforward access and round-the-clock referencing. Franchise software allows you to make the most of collective know-how and support by way of establishing simplified communications across multiple platforms. Furthermore, you can supervise the performance of franchise outlets in real time to spot and solve problems before they go out of hand.