With my nearly 20 years of professional experience within the franchising business arena, it is safe to say that the traditional and existing franchise training has failed its two most important constituents: 1) Customers and 2) Franchisees. The central tenet for franchisors to provide immersive training around key events is flawed and the manual-based operations courses are outdated methods to deliver daily success.
The inability to provide a consistent customer experience, deliver on the brand promise across locations, get new unit managers trained and productive(as quickly as possible), 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
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, these “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 franchisee employees critical in execution. Moreover, the courses are usually boring, not engaging and seldom interactive.
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 Regional / District Managers or operational “SWAT” teams, to spend inordinate amounts of time attempting to coach and mentor non-attendees without adequate tools to assist their efforts while at the same time the customer suffers. The franchisor field personnel spend valuable cycles on supplementing training rather than orchestrating the revenue enhancing efforts in their geographies. 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 training failures of the past and provide the franchisees with cost effective and eases to implement tools to provide a continuous learning and knowledge sharing environment that facilitates the “real-time” needs of franchise employees to delight customers.
With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, the ability to deliver collaborative knowledge management and training environment to increase franchise employee proficiency to business performance objectives are a relatively new phenomenon. By leveraging a variety of media to provide video snippets, simulations, core on-line course curriculum, 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.
While there are a number of solutions on the market today that address pieces of the continuous learning needs of the franchise community, only social LMS TOPYX on that addresses all of them. To learn more about how enable franchisees, please visit us at http://interactyx.com