| Wednesday, 28 October 2009 13:57 | ||
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Franchise Training Fails Customers and Franchisees The inability to provide a consistent customer experience, deliver on the brand promise across locations, get new unit managers productive (ASAP), and provide access to continuous knowledge sharing environment have an immediate impact on customer perception and wallet-share. The damage to the brand, the financial implications to the franchisee, the diminished franchisor's stature, and ability to concentrate on growth are difficult to repair. The potential death spiral can bring down the entire system, if left unaddressed. Lessons from Traditional Event-Focused Franchise Training Franchisor/Franchisee Impact
The immersive training techniques associated with new franchisee training, new location openings or the most common - unit management turnover - offer opportunities for franchisors to reinforce "delivering the brand". However, "drink from the fire hose" course curriculum do not offer timely post-training reinforcement of key course objectives nor on-going access to resources / experts. The learning is not sustainable for attendees or relevant for non-attending employees. For ongoing operational training and new product introduction activities, the ever-present debate of franchisor / franchisee cost absorption relating to travel expenses and time away from their location to go to regional or national training rarely gets addressed. The result is those who need the training the most are the franchisees that can least afford to take the training. The responsibility then falls to operational "SWAT" teams, to spend inordinate amounts of time attempting to coach and mentor non-attendees without adequate tools. The chasm between high performing and lower performing franchisees grows wider, reducing brand equity due to inconsistencies in customer experience. It is time to fix the past training failures and provide the franchisees with cost effective, easy to implement tools to provide a continuous learning and knowledge sharing that facilitates the "real-time" needs of franchise employees to delight customers. With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, the ability to deliver increased franchise employee proficiency is a relatively new phenomenon. By leveraging a variety of on-line media, franchisors can now affordably augment event learning with a continuous learning environment for all franchisees and employees. The addition of collaborative tools that allow for the enablement of effective knowledge capture, storage in a readily accessible location, and facilitating knowledge transfer to new learner communities of interest and on-going communities of practice are critical components in solving the franchisor / franchisee training conundrum.
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