The customer operates a UK wide business offering oven cleaning services to homes and businesses. The service is delivered by 25 franchisees, each responsible for a defined geographical area, who are provided with training, equipment and marketing programmes. The business model seeks to obtain repeat business by calling customers six or 12 months after their oven was last cleaned. A simple customer database was amongst the tools that the brand owner provided the franchises but this was inflexible and difficult to use.

Quinata was asked to provide a system to replace this with the following characteristics:

• Suitable for franchises that ranges from “one man and van” operations up to those employing five to 10 staff.
• Simple to use for franchises with limited IT skills
• Customisable so that franchises could use the system with the full range of business models permitted.
• Capable of generating all the paperwork required to confirm a booking for a customer and to instruct the cleaning technician what was to do done
• Capable of generating invoices and exporting financial data to Sage or other suitable accounting systems.
• Capable of generating a list of customers needing follow up calls six or 12 months after their last cleaning.

The system was launched at the customer’s franchisees conference in June 2005 and rolled out across their network in the following months.

Quinata worked with franchises to resolve one or two issues that arose because the old database was not always used in the way in which the customer’s head office had envisaged. The use of a remote support facility built into the system allows this to be done speedily and cost effectively, even where the franchise owner has little or no computer experience.

The system was then enhanced to provide more marketing related tools and to allow emails to be sent to customers directly from the system. These changes allow all the franchises to make the maximum use of the valuable customer data that they have accumulated and identify characteristics of potential future customers.

A simple book keeping facility was added for smaller franchises whose business does not require a fully featured accounting software package.

The latest enhancement adds the capability for the franchise owner to provide backup services and manage the licensing of the franchises from a centralised Franchise Management System. This system also handles generation of sales reports relieving franchises of the need to generate these manually.