This article was originally posted on QSR.
Brands that excel at customer experience generate 190 percent higher three-year revenue growth than their peers, states a Boston Consulting Group report.
“When people know that you’re keeping an eye on things, they tend to be in the right places at the right times.”
The larger a restaurant group is, the harder it is to measure success and maintain brand-wide consistency. For JoAnne Cook, training and new restaurant opening manager at Franworks, this has been a challenge since she joined the Franworks team in 2013.
Franworks is a restaurant group—based in Calgary, Alberta—operating 97 locations across five brands: Original Joes, State & Main, Elephant & Castle, Añejo Restaurant and Blanco Cantina.
In 2017 Franworks was acquired by Recipe Unlimited, the largest restaurant group in Canada. The acquisition was done with franchising in mind, meaning that Franworks needed methods of overseeing stores and new franchisees to ensure the Franworks standards were being upheld.
These changes were not aided by their current quality assurance processes. After years of relying on paper for site visits and daily checklists, Cook experimented with a handful of digital tools and found herself running into the same two problems, lack of user friendliness and complexities in managing multiple brands.
With lack of user friendliness, configuration was difficult. Which led to heavy reliance on flawed support teams. Once implementation was completed, store-level employees struggled with usability, lowering adoption and adding difficulty in training employees.
The second major issue, complexities in managing multiple brands meant each brand required separate logins. Cook was forced to manage each of Franwork’s brands as separate businesses. This also led to operational data being siloed, making insights more difficult to find.
These issues led Franworks to MeazureUp, who offers two solutions: DailyChex, task management software for the storefront level, and AuditApp, for chains looking to uphold brand standards. Franworks decided to adopt both solutions with the belief that numerous brands could be managed effectively under one roof.
A number of changes were evident in the first few months of the Franworks-MeazureUp partnership. First, the site visit tool was more user friendly, reducing the training burden that fell on Cook.
Configuration was also much simpler than before. Cook was able to both create and complete assessments without a strong technical background or relying heavily on a support team: “It gave us a lot of control internally to manage things ourselves, things that on other platforms we would have required support for.”
MeazureUp also enabled Franworks to execute a number of processes that were difficult with other solutions, like LTO audits and checklists and Environment Service Product audits and TheWORKS Audit. TheWORKS Audit, which has about 700 questions and takes one-and-a-half days to complete, are essential for showing Recipe Unlimited that brand standards are being upheld. With strong scores, Franworks has been able to flourish, opening 23 stores since 2017.
Franworks was also able to launch “Quick Visit Reports”—an ad hoc assessment to be completed by district managers on whatever store they’re working in that day. Completing 10-20 assessments daily brandwide, Cook found that Quick Visit Reports help hold everyone accountable. “When people know that you’re keeping an eye on things, they tend to be in the right places at the right times,” Cook says.
Scheduling temperature checks has been an important feature for Franworks as well. Gone are the days of hoping that safety requirements are being met, now there’s certainty that assessments are done in accordance with government regulations. This is especially important for franchised stores. Given Recipe Unlimited’s ownership, poor performance in a Franworks operated store could have negative impacts on Recipe Unlimited’s branding, and in turn, their bottom line.
Because of the ease at which these processes could be deployed, brand consistency became easily attainable. According to Cook as Franworks continues to grow their franchising program, she has confidence both Franwork’s and Recipe Unlimited’s standards will be upheld. “MeazureUp makes it easy for Franworks—who have 97 stores with multiple franchisees—to provide data insights to corporate leadership and individual franchisees. Overall, MeazureUp has been a great partnership for us.”
For more on MeazureUp, visit the brand’s website.
