Franchise Update Magazine Issue IV, 2016 | Page 44
BY KERRY PIPES
Shopping for
IMPROVEMENT
Mystery shoppers find many brands doing better,
but there’s still a long way to go for many others
F
ranchisee recruitment is the cornerstone of any successful brand. It
must be done right. It requires the
right team, the right information, the right
prospects, and the right follow-up. There
must be a proven process in place that is
followed and continually improved. But
amazingly, year after year, franchise brands
continue to fumble the fundamentals.
Whether it’s providing incorrect or
outdated information on a website or the
lack of a quick (or any) telephone response,
among other problems, many franchise
development teams are still in dire need
of improvement, according to this year’s
mystery shopping results.
Every franchise brand that registered
to attend this year’s Franchise Leadership
& Development Conference (FLDC) by
late July was mystery shopped by “qualified
prospects” who phoned in and completed
online applications. In total, 165 brands
were evaluated and the results were, once
again, a bit shaky.
Franchise Update Media’s Therese
Thilgen, along with “prospects” Art Coley,
CEO at CGI, and Maureen DiStefano,
franchise consultant, presented the survey results at the annual conference in
Atlanta in late September. The other
mystery shoppers and researchers were
Jenny Langfeld, COO at CGI; Eric Stites,
CEO of Franchise Business Review; Keith
Gerson, president and chief client advocate at FranConnect; and Jeff Lefler, CEO
of FranchiseGrade.com. Each brand was
evaluated based on their telephone query
response, website query response, website
42
best practices, franchisee satisfaction, and
FDD scoring.
This year we went directly to the
researchers for their methodology and
perspective on what they discovered in
analyzing franchise recruitment procedures and systems, and how they presented
themselves to prospects both online and
on the phone. Here are their insights.
Telephone
Mystery Shopping
T
BY ART COLEY
& JENNY LANGFELD
he mission was simple. Franchise
Update commissioned us to place
calls to the 165 franchise brands
registered for the Franchise Leadership
& Development Conference. We were
to pose as unqualified leads looking for
information. Art “Dudley Pennington”
and Jenny “Amy Pettit” divided up the
list and began calling. Here’s a look at
the process used and the results.
Three-step process:
• Part I: Go to franchise main website
and get a phone number.
• Part II: Place a call requesting to
learn more about the brand. Either talk
live with representative or leave a message.
• Part III: Follow up calls to the brands
that returned our call within 24 hours.
Then gather up data and results and
present findings.
Part I
“I’d like to speak to someone with ________
franchise. I’m going to visit the website to get
a phone number.”
The action was to find the phone number for inquiries to call when looking for
franchising information. If it took more
than three clicks on each of the prospective websites to find a phone number, that
franchisor was immediately eliminated
from the mystery shop list. We ended up
with 87 brands to call. This means that
48 percent of the brands were eliminated
because they either did not have a phone
number on their website or it took more
than three clicks to find it.
Part II
“Now that I have a phone number for
________ franchise, I’m going to call and
either talk to someone or leave a message for
a franchise representative to call me back.”
Of the 165 brands, 87 (52%) got a
call. We wanted to learn more about the
brand. We connected live with 35 of the
87 brands (40%) on the initial call. We
left messages with the other 52 brands
asking for a call back so we could learn
more. Twenty-eight of the 52 brands
called back within 24 hours. If a brand
called back after 24 hours, their file on
the mystery shop was closed. During the
first call with the brands 18 asked us for
our name and email address, 7 asked for
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