Tools You Can Use
Simplifying PC updates; automating call routing
Keep Your PCs Up to Date
A really hard job for any franchise company’s tech department is
coordinating all the different systems in franchisee locations. As
everyone gets more and more dependent on standardized machines and
programs, it’s easy to think that the basics are taken care of.
Not so, as Tim Davis of Mail Boxes Etc. discovered soon after taking the
job of vice president of technology for MBE in spring 2002, after its merger
with UPS. “I had concerns about antiquated software and a communications
platform that was not conducive to a retail system,” he says.
In 2005, Service Pack 2 for Windows XP was released. “We needed
to get it to the franchisees, and that got us to thinking about the
challenges of deploying not only the Service Pack but also other
administrative tools that franchisees aren’t accustomed to doing every
day.” That especially included security software updates, as well as
updates to browsers and other software.
It just wasn’t a top-of-mind issue for franchisees, who were more
concerned with getting customers and serving them than fiddling with
PCs. For those franchisees who did try to keep up, there were issues
such as which update needed to be applied, and whether it might in fact
be a step backward (a DVD with an older patch that would replace a
newer one, for example). All these issues, and correcting them, can eat
up a lot of a franchisor’s IT department’s resources.
“We had experiences where multiple antivirus systems were being
deployed by franchisees, and if they didn’t do their custodial work,
they’d get problems,” Davis says. “Employees might use machines in an
owner’s absence and download malicious software unintentionally. And
franchisees can’t afford to have the POS machine unavailable.”
MBE tried even the extreme solution of shipping out fresh hard
drives to replace all the software at once. It was a kind of prevention
program, but was obviously expensive and time-consuming—even
assuming owners knew how to replace a hard drive.
Davis’ staff had come across a company called Everdream, a
Fremont, Calif., software firm specializing in on-demand management
of corporate desktop computers.
“Our customers take a small lightweight agent and distribute that to
all their systems,” says Everdream’s Jim Obsitnik. “Once that agent talks
back to the Everdream control center, our customers access the
information through their Web browser.”
So the franchisor doesn’t have to do anything to roll out a new
update. Users don’t even have to make an effort to do the update,
Obsitnik says.
“As soon as the PC connects to the Internet,” he says, “it’s
communicating with the Everdream control center. It doesn’t have to
connect to the MBE network, and it could be at home or at the store.”
The program also is secure, so no PC is open to hacking while it uses
the system. Nor is it set up to collect financial data. Davis says that
MBE “wants to avoid the appearance of capturing their data,” so he is
working to set up a system so that franchisees can work directly with
Everdream to create automatic backups of their data.
Davis is happy with the results, and so are the franchisees:
“Franchisees by and large want technology to be something they don’t
have to think about,” he says. “It’s the nature of franchisees to spend
time on other things.” www.everdream.com
Mapping Your Phone Calls
We’re not done with telephones yet, much as we might think so.
Customers use the phone to call for locations and orders, and toll-free
numbers are still the mode of choice for most callers.
“Lots of older folks are never going to go there,” says Charles Austin,
president and co-owner of St. Louis-based AdGeo. The company
combines telecommunications with mapping reports delivered through
an Internet browser for a way to capture data about customers and
make that data useful.
“Customers are calling to get someone to come to them,” he says.
“We take toll-free numbers and allow franchises with national branding
to use that number. We route calls automatically to a local franchisee
based usually upon geography,” he says, although some might have
other criteria.
The data generated by the caller is displayed with other information
and presented on a map. A given franchise can have data on the whole
system, or an individual franchisee can see just his own. It is especially
useful for campaigns at the multiunit level, says Austin.
“We can get down to the street level,” he says. “If you go to a
telecom service provider, they’ll say they can do that, but it’s only by area
code and prefix. There’s no way you as a franchisee can think about
maintaining that. We’re able to let you describe how you want calls
routed.”
Calls are routed based on “caller response zones” designated by the
franchise. They can be based on the caller’s Zip Code, county, closest
location, political boundaries, franchise boundaries, complex polygons,
busy/no answer routing, time of day/day of week routing, historical
data-based routing, multiple terminations with percentage routing, or
round robin routing.
Although for franchises, the closest location is the likely choice, ad
campaigns might be set up nationally that might be routed differently
(some stores might be participating, others not, for example). Also,
different numbers can be set up for different marketing campaigns, and
the results can be seen on the map.
“We have one large group that has about 1,200 locations. We feed
this data to their ad firm so they can change a campaign overnight,”
Austin says.
Some franchisors are using the system to define proposed territories.
Once it’s approved, that’s updated on the central map, and everyone in
the system is operating from one set of data.
Austin calls it the “antithesis of a call center,” since calls go directly to
the location closest to the caller, rather than to a general center. An
additional advantage is that there are no annoying “To find the closest
location, press 3” messages. The probability is that a caller gets a real
person right away.
Cell phones present special problems, since they aren’t tied to a
particular location, despite having an area code. Callers are recognized as
mobile phone callers, so they can be prompted to select a location to
have the call routed there. It is an additional step, but until cell phone
companies start sharing more information, it’s necessary.
Franchisors or area developers can pick up useful information—say
if an individual store owner or manager insists that he’s not getting calls.
“The franchisor can show what actually did come in,” Austin says.
“We had one case where the franchisee said he wasn’t getting calls, but
actually he wasn’t answering the phone.”
Austin says AdGeo can show a franchisor where stores are not
performing, and provide data to decide where a store might need to be
relocated or even closed. www.adgeo.com AD
