How the Learning Experience Used 3 FBR Surveys to Create a New Company Metric
Learn how The Learning Experience Franchise used the FBR employee, franchisee, and customer surveys to create a company ‘Happiness Index’ to measure and improve their brand’s overall performance.
How well is your brand performing? How happy are your employees? Franchisees? Customers? How can you use that information to make your business better?
These are the questions that great franchise brands ask themselves.
FBR helps those brands get that information through satisfaction surveys for franchisees, employees, and customers to help leadership teams understand where there is room for improvement, and where their brand is thriving.
Some brands, like The Learning Experience, use all three surveys to capture their satisfaction data and feedback to create a clear picture of brand performance. This brand even created an internal company metric using the FBR survey results.
Meet the Brand: The Learning Experience Franchise
The Learning Experience (TLE) has proudly been known as the daycare and learning center brand with the motto “Happy Happens Here” for more than 20 years.
Founded by the Weissman family, TLE has nearly 450 open locations serving children from infants to kindergarteners, with headquarters in both the US and the UK.
TLE started their partnership with FBR with the franchisee satisfaction survey in 2014. Shortly after, they added the employee satisfaction survey and customer satisfaction survey (surveying the parents of their students) to round out the full picture of the brand’s performance.
“We were already so comfortable with our FBR partnership,” explains Brad Wahl, COO of The Learning Experience.
“There was such an ease to the franchisee survey process that it made sense for us to use [FBR] for our employee and parent surveys as well. We loved that the information came from a third party and was really actionable.”
The Challenge: Measure and Improve Brand Performance
TLE has always focused heavily on franchisee satisfaction. So as they added in the employee and customer satisfaction surveys, they were fascinated by how these results would work together and reveal new opportunities.
As the COO, Wahl worked closely with The Learning Experience Financial Planning & Analysis team to analyze all the data they collect as a brand, including the FBR survey scores. They wanted to understand what data was most likely to relate to high performing and lower performing centers.
“The FBR parent and employee scores were most correlated [with center performance] so we went with those as we started to create a company metric that measured performance,” explains Wahl.
The idea of creating a single metric based on the employee and customer satisfaction scores was rooted in TLE’s holistic approach to success. The team wanted to be able to communicate clearly around performance and create even higher franchisee satisfaction with one score for each location.
Wahl shared that the ‘branding guy’ in him loved the idea of naming this performance metric to reflect their culture and “The Happiness Index” was born.
“By combining parent and employee scores, we helped our franchisees understand and measure their success, which led to improved franchisee satisfaction as well,” shares Wahl.
TLE also uses the specific suggestions and feedback for each location to help guide improvements. Wahl explained that the survey results are used to better the brand as a whole, but specific feedback from locations is shared with owners as well.
“We want to see how these scores impact the brand at a high level…but we can also look at the suggestions for each location, which is hugely helpful for our franchisees.”
Creating Franchisee Satisfaction Through Tough Times
Beyond the unique and innovative idea of ‘The Happiness Index’, TLE has also notably seen improvements in their Franchisee Satisfaction Index (FSI) scores over the last few years. With a notable jump of 66 -82 FSI from 2019 – 2024.
We asked Wahl how the brand has continued to improve its FSI scores, and especially how they accomplished that jump in results from 2019 – 2024.
Wahl explained how TLE took a relationship-first approach through the changes of the 2020 pandemic and the years following.
“That time was crazy. One day we had 36,000 kids across our locations and the next day we were down to a few thousand. Those years drastically changed the scope of our business, as it did for so many,” shares Wahl.
Through that time, The Learning Experience senior leadership team started doing a weekly CEO call with their franchisees and sending out daily emails. Communication was everything. They shared grant opportunities, programs their franchisees could use, and walked owners through every decision.
“How did we improve our FSI score over those years? By never letting franchisees feel alone or unsure of what to do next. We shared information, motivation, and positivity, we really focused on all of that over the financials,” explains Wahl.
This approach worked.
TLE locations re-opened quicker than many of their competitors and the franchisee satisfaction was so high in those years that TLE ended up awarding more franchises than ever before. Even more amazing, many single unit franchisees ended up opening second and even third locations!
See the Results
It’s incredible to see franchise brands prioritize satisfaction and happiness in their franchisees. Even more incredible is that brands like The Learning Experience are prioritizing employee and customer satisfaction as well. Seeing ideas like The Happiness Index come out of the FBR survey data is a huge win worth celebrating.
Franchisee Survey:
- FBR Hall of Fame Award winners
- In 2019 had an FSI score of 66; by 2024 it was up to 82 FSI
- Most recent data showed:
- 88% enjoy operating their business.
- 90% enjoy being part of the TLE system.
- 92% are likely to recommend TLE to others.
Employee Survey:
- 76% of employees rated overall happiness as good or great
- NPS (likely to recommend to a friend or colleague) increased by 12 points
- Overall satisfaction rating is 75 across 20 key areas (an increase of 4% YoY)
Customer Survey:
- Overall satisfaction rating of 88% (up 3% YoY)
- NPS (likely to recommend to a friend or colleague) 9 points higher YoY
Interested in getting results like these for your own system? Franchise Business Review helps franchise brands at all phases of growth to understand your franchisee, employee, and customer satisfaction and identify areas to improve. Contact us to get started!
Related Resource: The 10 Biggest Roadblocks to Franchise Performance
Want to grow your system? Don’t let these common roadblocks slow you down!
Download our free guide to learn:
- 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
