In the last few years, the organised retail industry has exploded with companies setting up large retail chains at a feverish pace. Most companies developed a mix of own outlets Vs franchisees Vs in-shop counters.

Companies have poured in a lot of money and resources to ensure consistency of offering among individual outlets, in an effort to offer customers a common experience irrespective of the location.

While companies could control their own outlets - franchisees, who were expected to pay to participate in various customer engagement programmes, often rebelled against any centralised efforts. They were especially reluctant to share any information about their customers, understanding too well the value of their loyal customers.

While companies tried to ensure consistency of the billing and POS systems to capture sales and transaction data, not enough has been done to capture individual customer data. Loyalty programs have helped to capture some of this data, but often, franchisees have been found to control the customer participation in these programs to the bare minimum.

Dealer Dashboards - helping companies and franchisees manage their customers
Today, technology can enable companies to capture relevant data from all touch-points and communicate to each and every individual customer with a message of relevance to that customer, while simultaneously allowing the communication to be sent from each local outlet manager.

Dealer dashboards have been an eye opener for both companies and franchisees, helping individual franchisees understand the value of each customer, their individual performance at a micro level, and understanding how they stack up against the others.

With this ammunition, companies and franchisees can then evolve a common strategy to help franchisees maximise their performance, and technology can enable hundreds of individual offers within common brand guidelines, to be sent out to customers through mail, email, SMS, etc. from the franchisees' end. This gives the franchisees a sense of control over their customers, while enabling companies to track end customer behaviour at the backend. Overall it helps maximise customer satisfaction and hence the ROI.