Connecting Franchises: The Extended Enterprise

Posted by Michael Harvey on February 22, 2008, 8:15 AM EST

In conjunction with a recent piece of Concursive news, today I wanted to talk about franchise operations to discuss the importance CRM solutions can make in connecting such "extended enterprise." It is no secret that a franchise company's brand and reputation among its customers can often be measured in the sum, strength, and consistency of messaging throughout its stores.
Yet relying on each individual franchise to implement a solution consistently is probably unrealistic.

Without consistent messaging, sales, and data management, a single franchise may can be isolated from other franchise locations as well as its corporate headquarters. But with proper connection to the larger corporate hub, any franchise can be as strong as the company it represents. It is important, by the very nature of a franchise operation, to provide a standard set of tools across the network for customer relationship management, sales, and marketing. So what's the solution? Connecting the extended enterprise and tackling multiple issues in one fell swoop.

Allowing the corporate entity to host an on-demand deployment that provides each franchisee an independent system delivers an effective solution of consistency, and ease of deployment for the franchisees. Creating an easy to use system through the extended enterprise means high adoption which means valuable information gets put into the system resulting in overall benefits for the corporate headquarters. This same adoption of the extended enterprise also benefits the franchisees since it allows each location to benchmark their location against other franchise operators in a standardized way.

As I alluded to earlier, AlphaGraphics, a customer of ours with over 260+ independently owned franchise locations, was looking to solve one main problem of consistency throughout the business.

By implementing our easy to use ConcourseSuite 5.0, AlphaGraphics has guaranteed a high adoption rate amongst franchises. Franchise operations which function independently from each other need to project a consistent brand image to its customers in each market where the company is located. What could be more important to an enterprise than a sales and marketing tool that allows the consistent management of independent franchises and a standardized online presence.