Text Request Talks
3 Multi-Unit Franchise Tips with American Franchise Academy’s Aicha Bascaro
Business texting can aid in setting up processes to get your franchise to the multi-unit level.
Here’s how to use texts to streamline your most frequent communications, coach your managers on talking to customers, and hire cultural fits faster so your brand can expand.
This article takes insights from our Text Request Talks podcast with Aicha Bascaro and further distills it into advice specific to texting. Bascaro is the Founder and CEO of American Franchise Academy.
The following tips expand on how to mix in business texting with your existing tactics to reach multi-unit growth.
Watch the full interview on YouTube.
1. Document frequent communications and turn them into templates.
Bascaro stresses that successful multi-unit growth comes down to defining, documenting, and duplicating what’s already working at your brand’s current scale.
This helps you create a unified experience across all of your locations that can ultimately contribute to more happy customers and positive word-of-mouth marketing.
These are all things you want. So how can your franchise develop concise communication processes and accountability with text messaging?
Use text message templates to save frequent communications, and then your team can reuse it forever. These saved messages are useful for anything and everything, including:
Scheduling appointments and reminders
Frequently asked questions
Service or product details
Scripted sales or customer service follow-ups
Requests for online reviews
Templates not only keep communication consistent, they also save you a significant amount of time when your team isn’t typing out the same messages over and over again. That helps your franchise ultimately focus on other tasks related to multi-unit growth.
2. Coach your managers on how to communicate with customers.
If you can’t trust your managers to communicate effectively with customers, you won’t be able to scale to a multi-unit level.
Text Request makes it easy to jump in and coach managers on their responses to customers. This way you can give them pointers on how to improve, and eventually pass off communication tasks altogether. You’ll also be able to keep all your message history safe and secure in one place, in case there’s turnover.
Text Request offers the following to give your managers everything they need to be successful.
Groups: Create groups for things like current customers, location-specific customers, use cases, and more. This is helpful not only for identification, but also for when your managers need to message your groups for something specific, like a new promotion or solution. The contacts they need to prioritize will already be organized for them.
User Permission Levels: Gives managers the power to assign their reps to permission levels that best fit their levels of expertise to prevent oversights.
Contact Tags: So managers can identify contacts based on which rep they’re assigned to. Each rep can get their own custom color, so it only takes one quick glance at a Contact Tag to know who the message needs to be handed off to.
Bascaro says you need to let your managers be managers, so you can focus on other aspects of building your brand.
3. Hire quality culture fits faster.
Bascaro’s mentality is that hiring needs to be a constant focus, especially if your brand is going to continue to grow. You can't grow without successful hiring, and you need a system to hire successfully. So what can you do to stay on top of it?
Jump on quality candidates before your competitors do, by texting them as soon as their applications roll in. You can even automate texts to send whenever someone fills out an application form.
To get the best fits you’ll always need to request additional information, like references, certificates, start date availability, etc.. The good news is that you’ll also get all these things significantly faster when you ask for them over text.
Don’t lose out on time or a quality candidate because you were waiting for them to see your email or voicemail inviting them to come interview. Capture their attention ASAP with a text message to schedule an interview instead and stay connected with them throughout the hiring process.
Vetting for technical skills and setting up interviews to find out if the person is a good culture fit takes time—but text messaging can make it go faster, so you can enable people to help you grow your business better.
How Else Can Texting Help Your Franchise Grow to the Multi-Unit Level?
The above are just a few quick tips—but we have an entire in-depth franchise text messaging playbook for those who want to learn even more ways text messaging can help your brand grow.
Our business texting software has helped hundreds of franchises, and we’re ready to help yours next!
