When you walk into a Burger King in India, you still expect the same delicious burger as you would in the United States. That’s the brilliance of franchises: consistency defined by the brand promise.
Franchises create a unique world that transports you, no matter where you are. However, consistency isn’t easy to scale, especially when you’re looking to delight customers across dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of locations. In fact, delivering consistent but location-specific experiences is one of the hardest balancing acts in the business.
Every franchise carries the brand promise, and a single bad experience at any location can erode customer trust in the entire brand. That’s why franchises need to perfect their CX strategy.
Here are the top 7 obstacles you need to watch out for, and how you can address them to elevate your game.
1. Rapid growth vs. experienced service
When you’re on the path to growth, scaling locations is a logical progression. However, scaling too quickly without the necessary experience and data to back up the new locations opening can be detrimental to your brand.
Scaling too fast and opening too many new locations often means using shortcuts to make things work. This could result in overwhelming your supply chain, diluting training quality to get new locations started faster, and even working with less oversight, usually resulting in more errors from inexperienced staff. The consequence: unhappy customers.
Customers don’t care if the new location opened so quickly. But they do care if their expectations weren’t met, and if the experience was disappointing.
Solution: Growth is only a good idea if your CX strategy is in sync. Measured expansion is always better than sacrificing loyalty with subpar experiences.
2. Understanding cultural nuance
Imagine opening your coffee shop in Japan and, as customers walk in, they feel increasingly awkward with the extroverted and enthusiastic service being offered. Something just isn’t sitting right.
That’s because what’s considered warm and polite in one country can feel intrusive in another. In some cultures, being reserved and polite is more acceptable than being enthusiastically chatty. When you’re looking to expand globally, you need to pay attention to cultural nuance.
Much like the customers themselves, CX is deeply cultural, and it’s important to understand the expectations within your specific locations to deliver experiences that truly resonate with your regional audiences. When you ignore the cultural expectations, you can give rise to dissatisfaction amongst customers, even when your operational standards are on point.
Solution: Bake cultural intelligence into your CX rulebook instead of just focusing on operational perfection. Look to understand the cultural expectations within a region before franchising, to avoid a cultural faux pas.
3. Digital and physical experience gap
As the digital world becomes an everyday essential, having an app and an online store is just good business. But if your app isn’t in sync with your franchise outlets, you’re doing it wrong. As customers seamlessly move between apps and stores, it’s essential to sync your app with the different locations. For example, if your app says an item is available for pick-up, but when the customer arrives at the store to find it unavailable: it’s your brand that gets impacted.
Having inconsistent digital-physical journeys can make you look disorganized and unprofessional, often eroding trust. Omnichannel experiences aren’t just optional anymore, they’re crucial.
Solution: survey your customers to identify the digital versus physical experience gap and address their concerns.
4. Autonomy vs. accountability
Franchises are independent operators. While some innovate brilliantly, others cut corners. However, a bad experience at just one location can impact the reputation of an entire brand.
For example, a hotel chain renowned for its hospitality, has strict standards over the treatment of their guests. They have offered each of their franchise owners’ guidelines about how guests are to be treated during check-in.
Unfortunately, due to a glitch and bad management at one location, the hotel overbooked its reservations and failed to effectively address the concerns of guests who were denied a check-in, despite their payment. The result: mass distrust as guests expressed outrage online.
Solution: Guardrails are as important as freedom, and franchises should be held accountable for their decisions. By ensuring accountability and repercussions when locations fail to meet the brand standards, you ensure that each franchise delivers a consistent experience.
5. Ineffective customer loyalty programs
Have you ever signed up to a loyalty program only to realize that maybe you should’ve read the fine print? While loyalty programs are often determined by corporate, they can be executed locally. And when you realize that these loyalty program benefits don’t translate across locations, you’re bound to be upset.
This is something a lot of new franchises face. As customers sign up to loyalty programs but realize that the benefits are confined to one location or region, they begin to feel cheated.
With big brands setting the bar with exceptional benefits to loyal customers, the market expectations are changing. And if you aren’t ensuring a consistent expectation across locations, you’re missing out, because a broken loyalty program doesn’t just lead to annoyance, it leads to resentment.
Solution: Create loyalty programs that are seamless across the network, and if your program has exceptions, highlight these so that your customers don’t feel cheated.
6. Social media magnifying glass
News circulates fast in a world that chronically online. A single bad experience can blow up the internet, making headlines and influencing opinions.
When a customer posted a video about unsanitary practices at a local franchise, the view went viral overnight. As views started accumulating, the franchise was unable to hide behind the excuse of, “it’s only one store”, because the brand image is united online.
Solution: Proactive monitoring to ensure standards are met is a must, as is a rapid and unified response to concerns raised by customers. Implement social listening tools to stay ahead of the game, and ensure your customers feel heard and valued by rapidly addressing negative experiences.
7. Inaccurate experience measurement
To better understand what your customers are feeling, you need to ask them. And this doesn’t just mean using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. In fact, when you limit yourself to just one quick survey, you are likely missing plenty of nuances. For example: a fitness franchise noticed that they had a high NPS rating, and yet their customer retention rate was at an all-time low.
But why? As it turns out, they had an outdated platform with several bugs that made digital scheduling quite difficult for customers using certain devices. The consequence: these customers left quietly, because they simply couldn’t interact with the brand digitally. While they may have expressed their dissatisfaction to the staff, these concerns were not noted until it was too late.
Solution: While many small businesses begin and end their customer surveys with the NPS, it’s important to go beyond to better understand the reasons behind the numbers. It’s not just that you have a high NPS score, how satisfied are your customers? What are their engagement drivers? Do you have a custom metric that allows you to track parameters that really matter to your brand?
For example, a Wellness Resort looks to measure relaxation before and after their guests visit to understand how effective their experiences are.As you ask customers more questions, be sure to provide better incentives to encourage responses as well as a great experience.
CX solutions for franchise challenges
Franchises don’t just sell products – they sell an experience. A Hilton Hotel provides the same indulgence, no matter where in the world you go. However, overlooked challenges such as cultural mismatches, digital vs. physical seamlessness, inefficient programs, and more – these challenges are the fault lines that breaks trust and impacts customer loyalty. Each hotel location can make decisions that impact customer experience, even if it’s through improving employee engagement.
The strongest franchises are ones that see CX as more than a checklist. They understand that a great customer experience is an ever-evolving interaction between brand, franchises, employees, and customers. They understand that every aspect needs to work in tandem to deliver experiences that resonate as a local as well as at a brand level.
Get it right, and customers will reward you with fierce loyalty. Get it wrong, and you’ll see its impact ripple across the entire brand.
