How to Effectively Use Customer Feedback in Children’s Services Franchises

In today’s changing marketplace, children’s services franchises need every advantage to stay ahead. You can get a better sense of how to help by collecting feedback regularly and using that information in your decision-making process.  Here are some ways children’s programs can gather customer feedback to grow the franchise. 

How to Collect Customer Feedback 

A consistent customer feedback system will help you stay in touch with your franchises and assess their evolving needs. 

Surveys  

Surveys let you proactively collect feedback from franchises on a regular or ad hoc basis. There are several types of surveys, like Net Promoter Score surveys, that give you more specific information about the kind of success you want to measure. With surveys, you can ask specific questions regarding a franchise’s success, struggles, or other areas of needed support. Email allows you to send surveys to numerous people and franchises at one time, saving time, money, and energy.  

Social Media Monitoring  

One of the most potent sources of feedback that child services franchisors may forget about is social media. While social media can be used by the franchisor to broadcast the benefits of investing in a well-known brand, it can also be used to monitor what franchisees are saying about their success online. Companies may need to have a full-time social media manager or use monitoring software to monitor the feeds of several franchisees.  

Reviews and Ratings  

Support your franchisees by setting up a system to collect reviews and ratings. Franchise business reviews, as part of a consistent marketing strategy, can influence online brand reputation, leading to long-term, sustainable market growth.  

There are a number of ways to help your franchisees collect customer reviews. One common way is sending an electronic form or survey via email or social media. Another is to remind franchise customers to utilize sites like Google Reviews, Yelp, or the Facebook business page to talk about their experience.  

Customer Support Interactions and Chat  

Software tools can collect customer feedback during interactions with customer support agents and chatbots. This process can be automated, monitored, and analyzed over any given length of time. The responses can let you know the common questions customers are asking, their challenges, and help you identify ways to improve the customer experience. 

How to Analyze Customer Feedback 

In order to analyze customer feedback, a franchise has to go through several steps to categorize the feedback they are getting from customers.   

1. Put all your data from all feedback sources in one place. This makes it easier to know what you have to work with. 
2. Categorize your data. Start to notice if there are any patterns in themes or topics that start to come to the surface. 
3. Divide each comment into positive, negative, and neutral sub-categories. This makes it easier to see what your customers are saying.  
4. Find the root cause of successes and failures. Is there an employee that the customers seem to love and mention by name? Is there a particular place in the customer journey where service falls short? 
5. Make a plan to address the successes and failures. 

Best Practices for Analyzing Customer Feedback 

Companies can support their children’s services franchises by identifying patterns and trends across the industry as well as within individual franchise businesses. There are several different types of surveys that can be used to collect information. One popular method is the Net Promoter Score (NPS®),  a customer success metric used to measure customer loyalty and brand health as evidenced by revenue growth. Common questions include:  

• What franchisee tools helped you the most in getting your business started? 
• How likely are you to recommend others to join this franchise? 
• What do you need to be a more successful franchise? 

Open-ended questions are often used to allow the respondent an opportunity to express their experience without being coerced into an answer.  

The NPS® survey is a cost-effective communication feedback tool that can be distributed every three to six months to give the corporate office metrics on the performance of each franchise. Software platforms such as Listen360 can give an overall score on how franchisors are doing in the area of customer services. Are they creating champions from their customers? Are their customers largely apathetic? Or are there a large number of complaints? All of this information can be used to create an action plan at both the corporate and franchisee levels. 

While your customer feedback may vary among your franchises, there are some best practices for analyzing it.  

• Invest in ongoing, consistent marketing to get consistent, actionable customer feedback data. 
• Be consistent in collecting data across franchises for an up-to-date picture of the customer experience.  
• Involve cross-functional teams in all decision-making to ensure that all voices are heard. 
• Use a customer-focused approach that involves tactics like social listening tools can make it easier to analyze customer feedback.  

Get Started with Listen360 

Customer feedback can tell you a lot about your child care program franchises — if you have time to gather the information and look at the data. If your franchise business needs assistance in gathering feedback and analyzing the results to better serve its franchisees, then it’s time to utilize a customer engagement platform like Listen360.   

The tools within Listen360 can help your children’s services franchise business gather feedback and make changes in real-time. Start using hard data to help your franchise businesses make smarter marketing decisions.