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The core of the franchise model is consistency. When you walk into a McDonald’s, for example, you can be certain they’ll have a Big Mac on the menu (and relatively sure the McFlurry machine will be broken, too.) When you walk into a Little Caesers, you know for a fact they’ll have a $5 Hot-N-Ready pizza set to go (and that eating the whole thing in one sitting will fill you with self-loathing.) If your franchise doesn’t maintain this level of consistency, it can cause your customers to feel they can’t rely on you.
Every aspect of your brand needs to be consistent across your franchise locations, especially your customer service. In fact, 58% of consumers say the experience a brand provides is a defining factor when making purchasing decisions. If even one of your locations fails to maintain your standards for the customer experience, it could have ramifications for your entire brand.
One of the most important aspects of the customer experience is the phone call experience. 62% of consumers say phone calls are their favorite way to interact with a brand. The call is often the first point of human connection and they allow your customers to ask questions and get reassurances about their purchase decisions.
Despite the importance of the phone call experience, many franchises are falling short. They don’t have the technology and process in place to monitor and standardize the phone call experience across every location. This negatively impacts their conversion rates and causes churn.
Keep reading to learn how your franchise can use conversation intelligence to standardize the phone call experience across every location, increasing call conversion rates as a result.
One of the biggest issues facing franchise organizations is the “us vs. them” mentality that can develop between the franchisor and the franchisees. This is often fueled by inconsistent metrics. The franchisee may argue that the franchisor isn’t sending them enough quality leads, while the franchisor may say that they are sending quality leads — they just aren’t getting converted. This problem is especially prevalent for franchise organizations that rely heavily on phone call conversions, since tracking them isn’t as straightforward as tracking web conversions.
Luckily, there’s a solution that can solve this problem once and for all. Enter conversation intelligence: with this solution, franchisors and franchisees can get a single, objective source of truth to measure phone call performance. This ensures the franchisor and franchisee are on the same page and allows them to work collaboratively to correct any issues that they may uncover, instead of pointing fingers.
Below are some of the reports Invoca can generate to help you measure performance, detect issues, and improve collaboration:
If you want your franchisees to convert more callers to customers, you first need to make sure that you’re sending them high-quality phone leads — otherwise, they won’t have much to work with. To accomplish this, you’ll need call attribution so that you can understand how your marketing efforts contribute to the phone leads each franchise location receives.
Solutions like Invoca give you granular attribution about how many phone leads each of your traditional ads, digital marketing campaigns, paid search keywords, and webpages drive. This data allows you to make smarter media optimization decisions, so you can allocate more budget to the marketing campaigns driving high-value leads and cut spending on campaigns that are driving non-revenue generating calls. As a result, your franchisees will have more revenue opportunities to close.
1-800-GOT-JUNK is a home services franchise with more than 150 locations throughout North America and Australia. It uses Invoca to track its true return on ad spend from paid search campaigns. Soon after the marketing team started using the platform, they realized they had been significantly underreporting their call revenue to their franchise locations. The team then fed Invoca’s call attribution data into Google Ads to inform the Smart Bidding algorithm, allowing them to further cut cost per lead.
With the help of Invoca’s call attribution, 1-800-GOT-JUNK drove a 10% increase in bookings (with no incremental spend), a 20% boost in call conversion rate, and a 30% rise in the number of booked calls.
Read the full 1-800-GOT-JUNK case study here
Unnecessary calls can be costly for your franchisees — they can overwhelm representatives and increase hold times, causing abandonment and lost revenue from high-value callers. To deflect unnecessary calls, leading franchisors use conversation intelligence.
With a conversation intelligence solution like Invoca, you can identify the moments when shoppers choose to call rather than complete their purchase online. Invoca surfaces the caller’s entire journey through your website, from the ad or search keyword that brought them in, to the pages they viewed, to the exact click-to-call button they used to contact you.
In addition, Invoca’s AI helps you identify trends that are causing digital abandonment on each webpage. You may find that a certain product page doesn’t offer enough specifics for customers to make a purchasing decision, you may learn that your checkout process is long and overly complicated, or you may discover that your online shopping cart is stalling out from a server or backend issue. You can then take the right steps to correct the issue and deflect unnecessary calls from your franchisees, allowing them to focus on revenue-generating conversations.
There’s nothing more frustrating than when your customers try to reach out to one of your franchisees, only to be juggled between agents, put on hold, and asked to repeat themselves. Poor experiences like this not only cause prospective customers to abandon calls in the short-term, they also can make it difficult to build lasting customer relationships and brand loyalty — especially since 32% of consumers say they would stop doing business with a brand they love after only one bad experience.
When you use a conversation intelligence solution like Invoca, you can set up custom routing and IVR configurations for all of your franchisees from one central portal in the platform. This allows you to standardize experiences across your locations and ensure every customer can quickly get in touch with the right agent to meet their needs. Invoca also allows you to monitor your locations for issues and make any necessary changes in minutes, without any changes to your existing telephony or time-consuming IT work.
Below are some of the routing tools Invoca provides to help franchises improve call experiences:
Once the call is routed to the correct agent, Invoca can also help your team take the experience to the next level with pre-call whisper messages. These custom audio messages get played to your agents before they answer the phone, providing them with valuable insights on callers, such as their name, geographic location, any marketing campaigns they interacted with, and the webpage they called from. Your agents can use this information to anticipate the caller’s needs, pull up any relevant information, and tailor the conversation to win the sale.
Every aspect of the experience needs to be consistent across your franchise locations — if certain franchisees aren’t meeting corporate standards, they could tarnish your brand’s image and reputation. This goes double for the agents answering the phones — they’re more than just the first line of human contact; they’re the face of your brand.
But how can you monitor the quality of every phone conversation when you have dozens or even hundreds of locations, each staffed with a team of agents? Some franchises choose to listen to a small sample of their calls to do quality assurance and score agent performance. But this method is flawed — your quality assurance is only scratching the surface of the calls you receive. It’s probably not an accurate sample size to truly assess agent performance — you could be catching your best agents on their worst days or vice versa.
To solve this issue and get visibility into every phone conversation across every locations, leading franchises use conversation intelligence. Invoca uses AI to automatically score every call based on your brand’s unique criteria. You can also use Invoca’s dashboards to compare agent performance across locations. This gives you a complete picture of agent performance and can help you standardize the call experience, ensuring agents at every location provide the same high-caliber experiences.
Invoca’s automated QA can also improve agent morale, since they can rest assured that the scoring process is completely fair and unbiased.
Once you’ve used Invoca’s automated QA to score every agent’s performance, you can dive into its virtual coaching features. Invoca’s AI can automatically identify moments that you can use as coaching opportunities, so you can spend less time listening to calls and more time giving your agents feedback.
Once Invoca has identified your agents’ strengths and areas for improvement, you can coach them directly in the platform. Invoca allows you to highlight specific moments in the call transcriptions and @mention agents so you can give them feedback in real time.
Invoca also gives agents instant access to their own call scores, so they can self-coach and adjust their approach after each call.
Want to learn more about how Invoca conversation intelligence can help your franchise convert more callers to customers? Check out these related resources:
Want to see Invoca in action? Request your personalized demo.
