Secrets of successful franchises
It’s pretty common to read on the website of famous companies and retailers that the opening of new point of sale does not follow a franchising business model in order to “guarantee high level of quality consistent with the value of the brand”.
Most of the time it’s a “reverse course”, in other words a corporate decisions that follows the observation that the Customer Experience in franchising point of sales is not consistent with the one offered in flagship stores.
During the “Age of the Customer” it’s not anymore acceptable to not offer a superior Customer Experience that is perfectly replicable in every point of sale in your own country and abroad.
Each customer pretends to have a direct relationship with the brand, he wants to interact, to be entertained, to choose and live an experience with that brand everywhere: be it the website, be it the post-sale assistance and be it the shopping experience. This is why – other peculiarity of the Age of the Customer – the client contributes to the communication of the brand, mostly through social networks. Specifically, bad reviews that follow negative experiences lived in franchising point of sale are able to destroy the image of the entire brand.
Usually, contracts between a franchisor and a franchisee, even if “perfect and clear”, show inevitably areas of divergence and, most of the time, the customer experience suffers from these conflicts. From opening hours, to products’ selections, to number of employees, to visuals, to sales arguments, to fidelity initiatives with cards, to returned products, to promotions, to atmospheres lived in the store, to cleaning policies, to additional exposures… Well, every touchpoint must offer to the Customer the same persuasive experience in each point of sale. Even more than this, each touchpoint must suggest an experience (read here, “What is really, an experience?) with the same peculiarities of the promises made by the brand and reported carefully on corporate websites and on social networks.
A serious work on the Customer Experience, an intelligent and focus usage of Mystery Clients to study the experience of consumers, a training that facilitates the identification with the same experience of the customer: they are secrets for successful franchising. Additionally, e – learning platforms, effective and economic, are able to provide promptly many interesting updates (sometimes even on a daily basis).
