Enhancing Customer Experience in Franchising

Enhancing customer experience in franchising is an underrated strategy that makes a massive difference in system growth. Franchise Business Review conducts surveys across hundreds of franchises every year, and the results are clear: customer experience is key.

Customer Experience for Franchise Success

Customer experience (CX) is an often overlooked piece of the puzzle when it comes to franchise success. When customers love your brand, they’re more likely to be loyal customers, refer your brand to others, leave positive reviews, and even become franchise owners.

When your customer experience is working, you’ll see more consistent cash flow, new business growth, and a stronger brand following in your community. For franchise owners who rely on brand recognition and community support to grow their business, CX is a key element to success.

Learn how The Learning Experience franchise uses FBR customer satisfaction surveys to support their brand growth in this case study.

For the franchise home office team, your role in training franchise owners and creating a consistent brand experience across locations directly impacts the brand experience and customer loyalty for the franchisees in your system.

Key Components of a Strong Franchise Customer Experience

Franchise Business Review (FBR) has been conducting customer experience surveys for over 20 years to help franchisors shape training practices that directly support improved customer experience. 

Measuring customer satisfaction with the FBR surveys goes beyond Google Reviews or ‘how did we do today?’ style surveys. Assessing customer satisfaction is a deeper measure of customer loyalty and gives your brand answers for how to improve your CX across locations.

Here are the key components of a strong franchise customer experience that we see over and over in the survey results.

Consistency Across Locations

Customers want a consistent experience that they can trust, no matter which one of your locations they head to that day. Ensuring uniform service standards across your franchise locations helps to build that trust with every one of your customers.

Using standard operating procedures (SOPs) to maintain quality control helps to create that consistency for your customers. Any changes to your SOPs need to be rolled out smoothly across all locations, and site visits to check in on adherence to the SOPs can help catch any processes that start to slip. 

In your training process, help your franchisees understand the value that consistency creates for their customers so they prioritize and pride themselves on a uniform experience when they open and grow their businesses.

Beyond initial training, emphasis on CX and consistency is something that can be brought up in franchisee coaching, annual reviews, during site visits, and more.

Franchisee & Employee Training Programs

Enhancing customer experience in franchising is about implementing customer service best practices at all levels of your franchise system! This means prioritizing CX training for your home office team, franchise owners, and franchise employees.

CX training is not just for the early days of opening a franchise or onboarding a franchise owner; ongoing training for franchise owners and staff is a great way to address changes to best practices and continue to emphasize the importance of customer service.

By offering CX training to all levels of your franchise system, you’re more likely to create a consistent, positive experience for your customers across locations, which in turn translates to greater loyalty and profits. These trainings can also lead to an increase in company culture and pride in the service of the brand.

Leveraging Technology for Better Customer Experience

There are so many great ways to improve customer experience with technology! It’s amazing what leveraging different feedback tools and automation strategies can do to improve your customer experience across your franchise system.

Customers want to know you genuinely care about their experience with your brand, so tools like AI chatbots for website support, CRM systems for customer data, and review management tools to analyze and encourage reviews all help your brand stand out. 

Many franchise brands use custom mobile apps and loyalty programs to engage their customers, increase retention, ask for feedback, and improve based on that feedback. Customer surveys that measure long-term satisfaction, rather than just capturing a single interaction, provide opportunities to build lasting customer relationships as well as providing insights to guide operational decisions. 

A big part of why these tools work for CX improvement is how they help gather data so you can focus on the areas of your business that impact your customers the most.

Strategies for Improving Customer Satisfaction in Franchises

Improving your customer satisfaction isn’t a marketing gimmick or a ‘quick fix’ for negative reviews. The FBR customer satisfaction survey results shape your internal operations to boost retention and support relationship-driven customer service. The results are benchmarked against your other franchisees and allows you to coach your franchisees to improve their CX.

Interested in genuinely improving your customer satisfaction across your franchise? Based on our surveys and experience supporting franchise brands with CX results, here are the key areas to focus on to increase your customer satisfaction.

Personalization & Customer Engagement

Customers love a custom-tailored experience. Something as simple as when a front desk administrator remembers our names can really change our experience interacting with a business. We feel more cared for, more invested in the business, and more satisfied.

As long as customizing or tailoring service doesn’t sacrifice the uniform, trusted brand experience, taking the time to create a special experience for every customer is well worth the effort. From personalizing emails to creating loyalty rewards to remembering their favorite nail polish color.

How do you create more personalization in the customer experience? Data. 

Having notes on your customers in your CRM, tracking appointment details, understanding what your customers value based on analytics from your app, and more, all help you create more personalization while still maintaining a strong brand identity.

Handling Customer Complaints & Reputation Management

What makes a brand stand out when it comes to reputation management? Without a doubt, it is how you respond to negative feedback.

Managing customer complaints is not a fun job. Most franchisees will have some feelings of dread around the topic, but it is an important part of creating a positive brand reputation.

When replying to negative reviews, here are some do’s and don’ts… 

> Don’t respond emotionally, and don’t assume you will change their mind no matter how wrong you think they may be. 

> Do reply kindly, firmly, and briefly in a timely manner, and offer to discuss further with them away from the review software. 

Options for a kind but firm review reply could look something like this: 

“We’re genuinely sorry to hear you had a bad experience at our nail spa last week. We pride ourselves on our pedicure experience, and we would like to reach out and make things right. Our team will be in touch with you via phone to ensure we clear up this issue. Thank you again for your feedback.”

Having a set of guidelines for how exactly to reply to negative reviews, with options for different kinds of negative reviews, is a crucial element in customer issue resolution. Training around negative feedback, both in-person and online, is a massive part of a successful CX training process. 

Measuring & Improving Franchise Customer Experience

Like anything in franchising, measuring and improving based on data is a huge part of creating a positive franchise customer experience. Using data-driven insights is a way to refine your customer service strategies based on real analytics.

Franchise Business Review helps franchise brands understand their customer experience data through these key CX metrics:

Net Promoter Score (NPS): This is a metric that measures the satisfaction of your customers based on how likely they are to recommend your brand, product, or service to others.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Typically shown with a percentage, the CSAT score measures the satisfaction of your customers based on the number of satisfied responses.

Customer Retention Rate (CRR): Measures the percentage of customers retained by a business over a specific time to show the overall customer satisfaction levels. 

By putting tools in place to measure your customer satisfaction using metrics like these, you’ll be able to make improvements and refine your training to create meaningful change to your overall customer experience.

Investing in CX Strategies for Long-Term Success

When we take a customer-first approach to franchising, we create the foundation for a successful brand. Customer experience impacts loyalty, traffic, reputation, community, profit, and even franchise development. 

Customers are the core purpose of any business. When we serve our customers the very best we possibly can consistently across every location, we see the results across the entire business model.

If investing in CX strategies for long-term success is not on your radar, let this be your sign.

Ready to improve your customer experience? Learn more about how the FBR Customer Satisfaction Surveys can help you understand your customers better, track trends, compare unit-level performance, enhance your franchisee training, and improve your customer experience!

Related Resource: The 10 Biggest Roadblocks to Franchise Performance

Want to grow your system? Don’t let these common roadblocks slow you down!

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• Why franchisees often have unrealistic expectations for their business
• Why you could be wasting money on your development efforts
• How to get actionable data to measure progress and drive growth

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