What Is The Best Franchise CRM Software?

Want to tighten up your franchise’s customer service process? Free up labor hours for sales reps? Take your marketing campaign to new heights with personalized ads? Get the best franchise CRM software!

Do I Need A Franchise CRM?

A 2014 report by the Global Journal of Computer Science and Technology stated that “it is essential to maintain good relationships with customers… for long-term business survival. For this purpose, CRM software is the best option” (Nahar & Dhaka, 2014, p. 5).

For a small business, it might be possible to manage your customer relations using an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheet, but this is as time consuming as it is unwieldy. And for franchises, running your brand off a simple spreadsheet is out of the question.

Ultimately, only you can decide what your franchise truly needs, but you cannot deny the benefits that franchise CRMs have to offer.

Benefits Of Franchise CRM Software

• Better customer experience. Knowing more about your prospects allows you to personalize messages and provide more value from the start. Your franchise CRM makes it easy to keep track of all your prospects’ personal history, correspondence, and other details, then leverage this information to create resonant, engaging messages for the individual.
• Higher productivity. Franchise CRMs help sales reps eliminate data entry duties and other administrative busywork so they can spend more time in front of prospects. Your franchise CRM will also make it much easier to pull up necessary information before, during, or after client calls, saving minutes that can add up to months worth of labor time over the long term.
• Increased collaboration. It’s easy to customize your franchise CRM system in a way that allows departments to interact and communicate with each other to close sales, complete projects, or resolve customer issues. You can do so by sharing relevant documents via the franchise intranet or cloud-based folders, or setting up a chat for easy real-time collaborations. In this way, franchise CRM software makes it easy for salespeople to share best practices or “pinch-hit” when a colleague gets sick or goes on vacation.
• Greater insights. Franchise CRM systems offer valuable insights for franchisees and franchisors alike. Gather valuable data about rep performance, average deal size, and team-wide and individual conversion rates, flag recurring problems in the sales cycle (i.e. identify the deal stage with the highest abandonment rate), or measure deal velocity. Put simply, franchise CRMs allow you to see how good your business is doing and gauge the productivity of your sales representatives at a glance. These insights are invaluable for franchises in competitive spaces, helping you pinpoint efficiency leaks and add polish to your customer service and sales processes.

Best Franchise CRM Features

A good franchise CRM will eventually pay for itself through the profits it helps generate for your business over time. These are a few of the features a good franchise CRM should offer:

• Franchise intranet. Having access to a private franchise intranet allows the user to align key elements of messaging, documentation, systems, and support. Store important customer correspondence, data, and insights in your private digital libraries for easy dissemination, seamless integration with third-party applications, and simple collaboration.The alternative–manually tracking who has what, emailing documents back and forth, and remembering what and how you’ve updated your brand materials–is a total headache.
• Interactive help desk. This behind-the-scenes boon will keep things running smoothly from the customer’s perspective, reducing back and forth franchisee support for speedier interactions, query resolution, and hiccup-free progress through the sales cycle. Look for a help desk with searchable support tickets, FAQ, and discussion forums, at bare minimum.
• Task and event scheduling. Keep customers updated about works-in-progress, while automated reminders keep ground-level workers on-task and on-schedule.
• Invoicing and payment processing. Look for intuitive customer invoice and statement generation tools, application of payment against invoices, easy interfacing with Authorize.net for credit card processing, and simplified revenue reporting.
• Mobile capabilities. Everything your franchise CRM does from a desktop computer should be doable from any internet-enabled mobile device. It’s not an exaggeration to say that a good franchise CRM lets you manage franchise-wide customer relations from the palm of your hand.
• Multiple communication channels, manageable from a central UI. FranchiseSoft’s franchise CRM allows you to send SMS messages, emails, internal memos, or chat messages to anyone in your business contacts, all from the same dashboard. In this way, we’re able to meet our customers and prospects “on device, on demand,” so we can answer questions and share valuable information on whatever medium they choose.
• Franchise experience at the developer level. It’s tough for people outside our world to anticipate all the functionality that a franchisor expects from a franchise CRM. FranchiseSoft is made by and for franchise owners–it’s the solution we always wanted!

Book A Free Franchise CRM Demonstration

No single article can do our feature-rich franchise CRM justice, even the 1000 word behemoths like these. That’s why we take an introductory approach, then leave the “heavy lifting” to our virtual demonstration–that’s where you’ll really see what this solution can do for your business.

Visit the FranchiseSoft Demo page and fill out the short contact form to set up a short demo with one of our specialists. You can also call us directly at 888-302-3676.

References

Nahar, P., & Dhaka, V. P. (2014). A Review: Benefits and Critical Factors of Customer Relationship Management. Global Journal of Computer Science and Technology. Retrieved from https://computerresearch.org/index.php/computer/article/download/142/142