We’re certainly bolstering our database, and have made three deals since implementing - which for a franchisor is quite impactful.
High Touch High Tech delivers hands on science programs for children. We are a home-based business franchise system that provides outreach services to schools, preschools, summer camps, birthday parties, and after school programs.
When we receive a reservation from a classroom teacher, we pack all of the materials and bring them with us so we can deliver the experience right in the classroom. The schools don’t have to worry about loading up on buses, finding chaperones, packing sack lunches, and just the liability that comes with taking kids off campus. The field trip takes place right onsite in the classroom during the school day.
I am the Vice President of Brand Development and have been with High Touch High Tech for twelve years. I oversee multiple departments, while also rolling up my sleeves at local community events for our corporate-owned franchises, and traveling overseas on support visits for our international franchise locations.
The main challenge we had was the manual maintenance of contacts and getting our pieces into the hands of the customer. We’d have one spreadsheet that listed schools, but when we wanted to send out a targeted piece, we would have to put together a spreadsheet of individuals that we could contact.
We were manually segmenting our lists and constantly trying to keep them updated. It was difficult keeping tabs on what contact info was valid and what needed to be updated. For instance, we would send out a mailing and receive several of the pieces back because our contact information was out of date.
Sending bulk emails to our list was another challenge we faced. We had a separate email tool that was just clunky and not terribly user friendly. When we sent emails from this system, we had no insight into who was receiving, opening or clicking our emails. We also lacked any sense of engagement that our contacts had with our brand.
BenchmarkONE has been a great way to keep everything organized. We love the tagging feature, which helps us segment our list. We’re constantly identifying new ways to segment the contacts in our database so that we can be extremely intentional about our outreach.
The tracking capabilities of BenchmarkONE have been fantastic as well. I can see as a contact opens an email, clicks a link, or visits a page of our website, making it so easy to identify hot prospects we can be following up with.
We’ve also been able to automate campaigns and workflows. For instance, once we receive and confirm a reservation with a teacher, we can now automate their pre and post program communication. Our email templates are already set up so we can go right in and start them on a campaign. We can get important information into their hands – like support documentation and tools, reminders before our staff arrives on site, details around program delivery – all automatically.
We’re also able to automate follow-up post program. For instance, we send out a branded survey after the program and also direct teachers to our Contact Form and Google Plus page. This way, we get immediate feedback about their experience. My team is running programs out of four different locations, so keeping all of that communication organized manually would be challenging for multiple people – and the reality is that we only have one person managing outreach. BenchmarkONE has really been able to help us maximize our time and resources.
In-house, we use BenchmarkONE to communicate internally with staff. The email builder and newsletter templates make it incredibly easy to send out branded messages.
BenchmarkONE has definitely helped with growing client base. We have BenchmarkONE forms integrated with our website, so that when someone submits an inquiry, we’re automatically capturing all of the form fields in BenchmarkONE’s CRM, rather than getting bogged down with manually bringing their information into a spreadsheet. We’re certainly bolstering our database, and have made three deals since implementing – which for a franchisor is quite impactful.
Overall, BenchmarkONE is a very user friendly platform that helps you stay organized and streamline your operations. You can do more – whether you’re attracting new franchisees or growing your customer base – with the resources you already have.