3 Common Franchise Training Challenges (And How an LMS Can Help)

Delivering consistent training to your extended enterprise can be especially challenging when you franchise your company. You need to ensure that your franchise owners are upholding your brand standards, but each operator will have their own ideas about how best to run their location. While you might be able to afford them some wiggle room, it’s crucial that any location bearing your brand name operates in a manner consistent with your company’s goals and values.

Workforce training can teach franchise owners and employees how to best represent your brand, but providing learning programs for these businesses presents some unique challenges. Luckily, a learning management system can address these issues and help you maintain consistency.

Keep reading to discover three challenges you might face when franchising and how a learning platform can help you address them.

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Challenge #1: Delivering Standardized Training

Let’s say your company is a retail store known for selling clothing and electronics. Let’s also assume you have two franchise locations in a large city, Store A and Store B. In Store A, the electronics are at the front of the building next to the registers, but the staff at Store B keep these items at the back of the building. Customers who usually shop at Store A will be used to seeing the electronics as they walk into the building. If they happen to go to Store B and decide to grab some headphones, they’ll be surprised to see racks of clothing at the front of the store with no electronics in sight. They might wander around the store looking for headphones or an employee who can assist them, growing frustrated with how different Store B is compared to Store A where they usually shop.

Inconsistent experiences can confuse your customers and potentially damage your brand’s reputation and credibility. People like to know what they can expect from a company. It’s jarring for customers when they have vastly different experiences at two store locations with the same company name. The problem is that franchise locations are independently owned and operated, making it difficult to ensure that each employee at every location will deliver consistent customer experiences.

The Solution

Your company can combat this problem by using an LMS to implement comprehensive, standardized training programs for all of its franchise locations. An LMS lets you seamlessly deliver learning materials and training courses to franchise operators and their workforces no matter where the business is located. You can design a standard training program to ensure all franchise owners, managers, and employees understand your company’s “big picture” expectations. When everyone is training with the same program, there’s a greater chance of improving consistency for your customers across your franchises.

A multi-tenant LMS also lets you assign supplemental training materials depending on each location’s specific needs. You can assign each franchise location or groups of franchises training material without giving other locations or operators access to anyone else’s workforce data. Different regions or countries will have varying workplace cultures, and an LMS helps you address those unique training needs.

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Challenge #2: Low Employee Engagement

A standardized training program for your franchises is the first step toward developing a consistent customer experience. The second step is getting franchise owners and employees to actively engage with the training material. Newer franchise owners are likely to be preoccupied with getting their businesses off the ground, and training courses probably aren’t at the top of their priority list. Employees at these franchise locations are busy providing goods or services to their customers and might be reluctant to complete training courses when there are other tasks to be done.

If your franchise operators and their workforces are apathetic about your training programs, they might rush through the material without retaining any of the information. They could perceive the training as a checkbox item that needs to be completed instead of a meaningful training program that will help them improve their operations and better represent your brand.

The Solution

When designing your learning modules, it’s important to make the content as enticing as possible so people will be more inclined to actively participate in your training program. Many companies are turning to gamification techniques to keep their employees engaged with training content. This kind of employee training can also lead to enhanced business results. A Harvard Business School study found that employee training with gamification led to a 22.3% increase in new business opportunities.

Gamified training means using tools like point systems, leaderboards, virtual awards, and other game-like features to make training more interactive and engaging for employees. This kind of training incentivizes people to keep progressing through their courses. Often this is through a virtual reward system. With an LMS extension like Motrain, you can customize your reward system based on specific aspects of your training program. Employees earn badges or virtual currency for reaching various milestones in their training programs. You can then allow workers to exchange their virtual currency for larger rewards like entries into organization-wide raffles to win real-world prizes.

Comprehensive performance dashboards in your LMS help you keep track of which employees from various franchise locations successfully complete their training programs and earn rewards. You can also generate customizable reports to gain actionable insights about your training programs and workers’ progress that will help you enhance your future training initiatives.

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Challenge #3: Tracking Completion Rates and Performance Outcomes

Without an LMS to standardize training, franchisors have limited visibility into the learning and development progress taking place at individual franchise locations. This can cause setbacks when you’re trying to ensure that customers have a consistent experience across all of your locations. Without insight into training progress, you might not know which franchise operators potentially need more support in representing your brand.

The Solution

Implementing an organization-wide learning platform means you can track the training progress of employees at each franchise location and gain insights into which regions or stores have the best (and worst) performance outcomes. Learning platforms like Open LMS include robust reporting features so you can gain granular insights into your training programs. Drill down to specifics using 20 different information sources so you can make data-driven decisions that help franchise owners improve their businesses. These insights also help you make strategic choices about future training initiatives so you can keep growing your organization.