Your Area Developers are the face of your brand to your franchisees. They play multiple crucial roles, having to communicate your strategy and direction to franchisees, ensure compliance with your operations manual, and help improve franchisee performance. They must be brand ambassadors, business coaches, trainers, and often the shoulder for franchisees to cry on. How well they fulfill this role will have a significant impact on the performance of your franchisees, and therefore your business.
Are Your Area Developers Out of the Loop?
Often an Area Developer walks into a scheduled franchisee field visit, only to be hit with issues they aren’t aware of, or haven’t been briefed on. They simply aren’t ‘in the loop’ on the interactions that have occurred between the franchisee and the National Support Office. This causes lost time, turning field visits into operational complaint-fests leaving less time to address the important issues and add-value to the franchisee’s business.
Improve Communication Between the Franchisor, Area Developer & Franchisee
Usually with no better tools than a pen, an evaluation form, and an iPad / laptop, they struggle with arranging busy visit schedules, completing and filing discussion notes, and following up on franchisee action plans. Generating more and more emails as they go about their job.
For the Operations Director/VP managing this remote team is a difficult job. Since a good Area Developer will spend 80%+ of their time on the road, communication becomes cumbersome. So ensuring everyone in the team is asking the right questions at franchisee store visits, checking the right things, evaluating the franchisee using the same measures and the same criteria, is a constant battle.
Empower Your Area Developers for Effective Field Visits
The Field Visits module empowers your Area Developers with a set of powerful tools to more efficiently arrange and run a schedule of visits, record discussion notes and set up and track agreed action items resulting from the visits. When used with our Contacts module, your area developer will have easy access to the entire history of interaction between your NSO and franchisee, allowing for ample, efficient preparation.
You can set-up and view field visit calendars, record notes and standardise checklists for evaluation purposes. Rapidly enter agreed action items that become trackable in the future. Then quickly send copies of the field visit note to franchisees, or notify others in National Support Office of important issues that have arise.