A customer has a question about a specific branch. She finds the brand website, uses the contact form, and describes her situation in detail.
It arrives at head office, where somebody reads it, works out which franchisee it belongs to, and forwards it. That takes a day.
The franchisee contacts her and asks her to explain the situation, because the forwarded email contains a form submission and no context. She explains it again, two days after she first wrote it down.
Who currently does the routing
A person at head office, reading every enquiry, deciding which location it belongs to and forwarding it, which is a full time task disguised as an inbox.
Who should do it
Automatic identification from what the customer says and where they are, with the enquiry reaching the right franchisee immediately and intact.
What head office should keep
Brand level questions, franchise enquiries, press, supplier approaches and anything genuinely central, which is a small proportion of the volume.
What franchisees should receive
Local enquiries, complete, with everything the customer already said, so the first contact advances things rather than repeating them.
What the customer experiences now
A day of silence, then a request to explain again, which reads as an organisation that does not communicate internally.
What the brand loses
Enquiries that go cold during the forwarding, which nobody counts because they were never attributed to any location.
Step one: define what is central and what is local
Written down, since the forwarding decision is currently made by judgement each time and varies with whoever is reading.
Step two: establish location at the point of enquiry
By asking, rather than by inferring from a message, which is the routing principle in local enquiries arriving at head office.
Step three: answer the brand questions centrally and instantly
Policies, products and anything true everywhere, which removes a large share before routing is needed at all.
Step four: pass the conversation, not a notification
Everything the customer said, so the franchisee opens a complete picture rather than a form submission.
Step five: handle the complaints separately
Because these have a different route and a different urgency, which is the ground in complaint routing between branch and head office.
Step six: set a response expectation and monitor it
Head office should know whether franchisees are answering what they are sent, which is currently invisible across most networks.
Step seven: report volume by location
Which turns the enquiry flow into something the brand can manage rather than something it forwards.
Step eight: give franchisees visibility of what is coming
A franchisee receiving enquiries with no sense of the volume, the pattern or how they compare with the network has no way to staff for them. The reporting matters as much to them as the routing does.
Step nine: handle the enquiry that belongs to no location
Somebody outside every territory, or asking about a location that has closed, needs an answer rather than a forward to nobody. These are the enquiries that disappear entirely in most networks.
Route at the point of arrival, not through an inbox
An assistant that answers the brand level questions instantly, establishes which location an enquiry belongs to and passes the whole conversation to that franchisee removes a day of forwarding and a second explanation from every local enquiry. The franchisee side sits in existing franchisee enquiries that head office must route, and the cost of delay in out of office replies cost customers. Start at try, see features, and the sector view sits under b2b.