The goal of every business is to provide a great experience for its customers. That leaves a positive impression of the brand and the products or services it offers. It also leads to a greater possibility of continued relationships and repeat business.
Ensuring customers have a positive experience takes a lot of work and collaboration from many departments throughout a franchise system. While a marketing department may lead these efforts, they may work with the operations, finance, IT, and sales teams.
Franchise Update recently spoke with four franchise marketing executives to see how their brands work with other departments to elevate the guest experience.
Chief Marketing Officer
Moran Family of Brands
Our marketing team strives to offer comprehensive resources to empower franchisees and enhance the customer experience. Whether through training, marketing initiatives and materials, or online review evaluation, we provide our franchisees with the tools to create a positive customer experience.
Our operations department complements our efforts by reinforcing marketing messages and including the marketing team when necessary, creating a seamless partnership. We also provide our operations team with guidance on customer expectations and emerging market trends, allowing it to adapt processes and services as needed. Our partnership extends to the field, where franchise business coaches use the marketing data we gather from reviews to help franchisees refine their approaches to customer service, focusing on creating positive interactions online and in person.
While the coaches focus on creating positive customer interactions, our marketing team complements their efforts by enhancing our brand reputation. Working together enables us to create a cohesive strategy that sets a high standard of support in our industry.
Chief Marketing Officer
Premium Service Brands
Particularly within the realm of franchising, it’s imperative that every home office department understands each other’s contributions and actively operationalizes relationships. Cohesive teamwork is vital, but it’s the shared understanding of each other’s roles that truly drives success.
Given marketing’s involvement across various departments, it’s crucial to establish an objective road map. When developing a strategy to integrate your departments, it is important to clearly define roles and expectations for each team while also determining the amount of crossover with each side. When establishing roles, create an easily accessible accountability map to help your company visualize where responsibility and resources are housed. How the departments interact and communicate should be consistent with your company culture. Implement the strategy slowly from the ground up.
Through coaching, based on guidance and experiential learning, you can guide franchisees on how to do this within their locations. Ultimately, this collective effort ensures a harmonized guest experience from initial brand exposure to ongoing service and experience excellence.
Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer
Zaxby’s
As marketers, we need to understand our guests’ preferences to create appealing products and meaningful brand experiences. A strong consumer understanding is the competitive advantage, specifically in the crowded QSR category.
Creating a QSR brand that stands out from other key players in the market is a cross-functional effort across the business. We must work as one team across all touchpoints that impact the guest experience. This isn’t just limited to our external marketing efforts; it is equally applicable to field operations, our internal training teams, and more.
At Zaxby’s, we work to optimize the quality of our products with the supply chain while testing new items from our culinary team based on data-driven consumer insights. This is a cross-functional effort across departments, including ops, supply chain, menu innovation, marketing, finance, and IT. Our highly collaborative workstream enables us to drive sales overnight while building our brand over time. We are focused on the long-term, sustainable growth of Zaxby’s as a strong player in the chicken QSR category. Growing a business responsibly means creating a brand that consumers love and delivering a great guest experience at every visit.
Chief Marketing Officer
Buzz Franchise Brands
Collaboration across departments is key to elevating the customer experience. Our approach begins before we have the customer onboard with a focus on efficient lead management. This pairs strategic marketing initiatives to drive inquiries with an intentional focus from the operations and sales departments to guarantee quick, personalized responses to set the stage for a strong relationship.
The beauty of franchising is that we’re always trying new things in different areas. We can share those experiences to better the system. To do so, communication within our corporate team and franchise system must be efficient to optimize that information sharing. Our marketing team works in lockstep with our franchise business coaches, analyzing data to identify and act on opportunities for improving customer experience.
Our tagline at Buzz Franchise Brands is to “build brands that get people talking.” Nothing does that more than a customer experience that goes one step beyond the expected, but it takes seamless collaboration across departments to achieve that goal.
Story originally published by Franchising.com.