How I improved franchisee satisfaction by dumping email

Video game retailer GameTraders has been one of the few benefactors from the global financial crisis. As customers started saving their money and looking for cheap deals, businesses with a focus on second-hand goods started seeing more activity.

Now the company is turning over $35 million and managing director Mark Langford says business is strong.

But there’s another reason why GameTraders is on the rise – according to consulting firm 10 Thousand Feet, franchisee satisfaction in the company has been rising over the past three years.

The reason? Langford made a calculated decision to stop using email and instead talk to franchisees over the phone. He says the move ended miscommunication, and gave the franchisees a connection with the head office.

How’s the business travelling?

I think business is getting harder, and has been getting harder over the past three years. I think better control systems are needed to know what franchisees need to do, and I think better communication systems are needed also to keep them all in the loop.

When did you feel things started getting hard?

It was when the GFC hit. It was in the early part of 2008 when things started to really take effect, and we just felt that we needed to get out and visit our stores a lot more. Our budget for that area of the business totally blew out.

We’ve got 33 locations, so we would have spent a lot more than our budget going to see them, so it was a big call to make because when things are tough, we decide to go out and spend more money.

But I think the difference is that with a franchisor, you have to take charge and decide to be pro-active, whereas a lot of smaller businesses just end up cutting costs and that hurts them overall.

What else did you do?

It was a number of things. We got out face-to-face, and that’s obviously better than being on the phone. But we used that too.

You also stopped using email as much. Why email in particular?

It’s easy to send things through email. It’s simple, you can spend time to think about the message you want to convey. But the trouble is that it can easily get taken out of context. I call it email wars, where people take something out of context and it starts a fight.

So you can have this endless loop which is ridiculous, with people misunderstanding things. So now we get on the phone a lot more and don’t do email as much.

Was this a casual thing, or an actual strategy?

It was very much a calculated decision. We said, we have to get out face-to-face, and the other factor was that for years we’d had problems with email.

Was that decision to go out and see more franchisees based on some discontent in the business?

Our relationship with our franchisees is in good shape, it’s probably the best it’s ever been so there are no recent examples, but we have had experiences with that before.

A few years ago we thought there was a group causing dissent. You will sometimes have people who are wanting to cause factions within the group. Many of these businesses aren’t typically doing well and believe everything to be the franchisor’s fault. They want to get people on board.

They didn’t make it through the GFC.

Do you think that had something to do with it all?

I think it had to do a lot with the GFC. There was a lot of uncertainty during that period, and it became competitive.

Now 10 Thousand Feet says your franchisee satisfaction is quite strong.

It’s been on the rise for a few years now, and is the best it’s ever been. I think it’s because of all of what we did.

What do you think the benefits of this strategy have been?

I think the other aspect of this is that franchisees need to know the guidelines in our business, and they need to be clearly communicated. In the past we would communicate via email, and messages would end up getting left in an inbox with one hundred others. We wouldn’t know if they ever read them.

Now we have a system that shows what messages everybody has read. It’s a new system, and allows us to follow up things with phone calls. And phone calls are a good first step, because these people are business owners and they are busy people.

They don’t necessarily have time to deal with hundreds of emails, and so if we have something important we need to tell them, then we call them up first.

Could you give an example of something?

If we can see a trend in a store which is going against the group average, for instance if their sales are totally out of whack in one area, we’ll call rather than email. If we think there is a problem we will call first, and then follow up in writing. It’s just simple.

We know our business, and we can identify what the problem is just looking at the ratios of sales between different items. If there are fundamentals wrong there – and not just with that, but with other things as well – we can call those people and figure it out.

Did you tell your franchisees about this plan?

We encourage our franchisees to not use email as much. Don’t spend half an hour writing an email if there is a problem, when you can just call.

What was the feedback like?

I think it’s positive. There’s always a perception with a franchisor that they sit in the ivory tower and aren’t doing much. When in reality we are running a complex franchise, with different personalities.

Do you think this is something other franchisees should try?

I would definitely recommend it to all businesses. You have to do more to communicate with franchises, even if that means picking up the phone more or going out and doing more visits. They want that communication.