Get ready to crush your 2025 goals by leveraging the power of your phone calls.
We’ve assembled the most important research and best practices from helping thousands of franchisees - and their franchisor leaders – get better results from inquiry phone calls.
We’ve organized these insights into 5 areas that impact the most critical areas of success:
- Improve Recruiting + Retention
- Drive Marketing ROI
- Harness and Leverage Data
- Smarter Upskilling
- Increase Profitability
Check out our free ebook with fresh ideas to set your plan for success.
Your franchise candidate has done the research, read your press and checked out reviews – now they want to reach out to learn more.
They get to your brand’s development website and start to fill out an inquiry – but something’s not working right, preventing them from connecting with your recruiter.
The result? A bad first impression and potential loss of the lead. With a conversion rate of about 1% from initial lead to deal in franchising, you have to ask yourself – is your technology helping your conversion rate? It is delivering a great first impression? Is it increasing your recruiter efficiency?
If your systems are working well, the answer should be yes to all three questions. But how do you know if all is right on your site?
Learn More
The ServiceScore® team has researched hundreds of franchise brands over the past 5 years to provide Mystery Shopping performance data for the STAR Awards at the Franchise Leadership and Development Conference, produced by Franchise Update Media.
We've put together the top 10 ways - with real-life examples - to make a better first impression and ensure leads can effectively and efficiently move to the next step.
And don’t miss our "Check(list) Your Tech" at the end, a summary of tactics and frequency for keeping everything tuned up. Read on for the 10 biggest opportunities to drive a better, more effective lead process – when you Check Your Tech!
DRIVE MORE PROFIT
If phone calls are part of your customer journey, improving performance can be the biggest, fastest and easiest way to increase profit.
FASTEST:
Call conversion doesn’t happen by just being “friendly”. Most of the frontline folks that we review are courteous. The difference between a call turning into business – or not – is executing methods that are very specific, but are also easy to train. The key is having the call performance feedback to make data-based decisions on where to improve. With clear coaching and support, most staff can immediately improve in asking for business, sharing what’s special about their brand, conveying expertise, showing gratitude and making a genuine connection. When you’re armed with what the team needs to do to get better results and have trained these expectations, results can improve as soon as the next call is answered.
EASIEST
Why do NFL coaches review game video with players? When it comes to driving performance, most people respond best to objective, quick and clear feedback. For improving call conversion, this happens with quantifiable metrics on a scorecard with recordings of the actual calls to make the feedback easy to deliver and digest. The coach isn’t sharing their opinion on what happened – the team member either won or lost the business by how they executed. In call performance, spending 5 minutes reviewing a call score card with the call recording is the best way to give that quick, clear feedback that drives immediate improvement. And at ServiceScore, our reports include ways to model each aspect of the call – so the manager has real examples of the performance needed and can even role play to build authentic confidence with the team member.
BIGGEST
Better performance converts more calls – and so much more. Most businesses have a call conversion between 30-50%. Let’s say a business gets 30 calls per week for new business – about 4 a day. Converting just one of these calls to new business at a customer value of $200 delivers $72,000 in added revenue – and most goes right to the bottom line! You’ve already invested in the marketing, phones, people and rent – after direct product/service costs to serve this added new business, the rest is pure profit. And better call conversion is just the beginning! Understanding and improving phone call performance helps drive upselling/cross-selling opportunities, new ideas for innovation, customer loyalty, more referrals and more. Where else can you get this type of ROI?
The ServiceScore® ROI Tool
We love the old saying, "Nothing happens until someone sells something."
In a business that thrives by converting incoming phone calls to appointments to close the sale, inside sales effectiveness is critical. When you add up all your investments to make the phone ring, if you don’t create a trusting connection to convert that call to an appointment – then all those efforts won’t pay off.
Improving call conversion is one of the most cost-effective ways to help Franchisees improve profitability. Why? Because you've already invested in the advertising, the salespeople, the fancy phone system and the people to answer those phones. The value of being able to convert just a few more of those calls each week not only drives higher revenue, but dramatically improves the ROI of all those other investments.
For example, for a single location with 5 inquiry calls per week, moving the conversion rate from 46% to 50% can mean an annual revenue increase of $52,000. Better yet, that comes with no additional investments in sales, marketing, phones or people.
To help you measure the transformative impact to your business from increased call conversion, we've created the ServiceScore ROI Tool. With just five inputs, you can see the results from setting and achieving your inquiry conversion goals.
Let us email you the ServiceScore ROI Tool today!
ServiceScore® overview (pdF)
We've put together an easy-to-print summary for you. Learn how ServiceScore helps Franchisees and other small business owners improve their customer connections, call conversion and ROI of their marketing investments.