Successful franchises identify, create and capitalise on the customer experience to drive franchise performance, write Peter Buckingham and Dr Craig Peacock.
Customers are the source of real growth and today’s customers expect immediate and personalised interactions. To meet these expectations franchises need to differentiate their brand through timely, targeted and tailored customer experiences based on real-time data analytics.
So how do you create great customer experiences which drive franchise performance when your customers’ behaviours and habits rapidly change?
The answe is by linking real-time customer experience and franchise site performance into actionable plans.
4 steps to unlock the customer experience and drive franchise performance
1. Discover the customer experience
- Tap into specific surveys you may create, along with the social media platforms to see how the customers feel about the franchise or store they are purchasing from.
- Establish a reliable baseline of experience and performance
Mapping the customer interactions with your franchises is a sound business strategy. In today’s world, this can be done with smart software combining and analysing the information from multiple sources such as reading the feeds from social media such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and specific customer surveys automatically sent to your customers.
2. Measure the customer experience and performance gaps
- Measure the customer and brand experience for each franchise or outlet
- Identify the channel and customer pain points
- Look for the gaps at individual business locations
Uncovering and measuring the moments that matter is critical in creating a genuine customer experience. If there are certain common issues at certain franchises, then these will start to show (positively or negatively), and actions can be planned to improve the experience or remove the problem.
3. Develop actionable insights
- Prioritise touch-points to address business opportunities
- Improve conversions
- Reduce customer churn
- Enhance loyalty
Connecting with your customers, conducting customer experience surveys and measuring social media sentiment is the start of developing actionable insights to improve the business. Dashboards can be set up to give a consistent view of the stores or franchises in your system.
4. Optimise the customer experience and franchise performance
- Dashboard analysis to allow easy interpretation
- Increase share of wallet
- Improve gross margins
The well-designed customer experience and franchise site performance dashboard will highlight how customers’ preferences and behaviours are changing and will provide many profound insights into where the customer segments are moving.
These insights are integral to strategic decision making and improving long term customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Benefits of high customer experience
Our experiences conducting customer experience research has shown that organisations with a high customer experience have higher customer loyalty. Our research confirms that customer experience is a prerequisite for customer loyalty, and in turn, customer loyalty is one of the most critical drivers for the long term, sustainable business growth.
Linking franchise site performance with customer experience on a site by site basis is fundamental to unlocking the customer experience and driving franchise performance.
A positive customer experience not only results in making your customer happy but leads to additional revenue through:
- turning new customers into loyal customers
- increasing customer advocacy
- helping your brand stand out from competition
- building trust and creating personal relationships
This approach translates your business objectives into real-time customer experience metrics and dimensions that you can use to measure, improve and drive performance. So, it’s pretty important to get right.
By concentrating the focus of the customer experience insights on the customer journey, your franchise will achieve genuine consumer satisfaction and improved business performance.
Peter Buckingham is managing director of Spectrum Analysis Australia, a geodemographic and statistical company. Dr Craig Peacock FAICD is a director of Chase Consulting and helps
executives and boards convert opportunities into strategies and initiatives that deliver innovation.