It’s Go Time

Sam and Louie’s Pizza Conducting an Action Card Review

This morning, a week before the International Franchise Association Convention in New Orleans  Action Card officially went live.  Action Card has been in beta test since October of last year and we’re excited to roll it out prior to flying to the Big Easy and showing off our baby at booth #1239.  We’ve been pleased with the feedback provided to us by our beta group, whose businesses range from restaurants and entertainment destinations to dry-cleaners and home repair franchises.  The common denominator among these groups is there dedication to maintaining consistent brand standards at all of their locations.  Read about how Ripley’s Entertainment uses the app.  Ripley’s Believe it Or Not understands that creating a positive customer experience means ensuring consistency to a winning model at every single franchise location.

Bottom Line – Where is the Value?

As Action Card has evolved and added features, we’ve validated some key assumptions about the market fit for this tablet review tool.  Here are some things we’ve learned from our active clients about Action Card.

• Moving away from paper reviews is saving anywhere from 1 to 5 hours of time per review
• Being able to take and upload photos into reviews has been extremely popular and helps illustrate and justify checklist items
• Involving franchisees in the review process helps change the tone of reviews and makes reconciling to-do items a lot easier to manage
• The reporting built around the data collected from reviews is of great value to administrators when tracking trends
• The transparency created through the web-based reviews is equally popular with Ops Directors and Field Reps

The idea behind singing up 20 beta-testers was to get as much feedback from users in the field and office and develop a product that speaks to a very specific need among franchise companies.  The result is that application – by franchises for franchises.

Is Action Card Only for Franchises?

Technically any business that conducts regular standards reviews could realize value in this mobile app technology.  Our focus now is on helping the franchise industry.  We want to move away from audits and into collaborative reviews and change the often contentious relationship between franchisor Ops and Compliance personnel and the franchisees whose revenue growth both rely on.  And we’re off to a good start.  Prior to launch we already have over 1,000 locations signed up.  Franchisors invest a lot in defining and managing their brand.  Action Card makes the management of this process a ton easier.  Identifying specific items at the location level that should be recognized for excellence or flagged for correction is made easier by this collaborative app.  Franchise companies whose brand and the replication of the brand are the heartbeat of their business stand to realize the greatest ROI from Acton Card today..