How To Make Frontline Training Relevant For A Brand With Multiple Franchises

Consistency plays a significant role when a brand has multiple franchises. Each franchise needs to mirror the business model to ensure frontline training programs focus on brand recognition and winning customers’ trust. Ensuring all the employees speak the same brand language while coordinating with customers in different regions is paramount for a brand’s reputation. 

Moreover, the frontline, being the face of the company, must be equipped with the same knowledge and information to deliver a consistent experience throughout all the franchises.  Therefore, a business with multiple franchises must have a robust frontline training process streamlined across all its branches. 

“The single biggest driver of business impact is the strength of an organization’s learning culture” – Josh Bersin 

Why Is Frontline Training Important For A Brand With Multiple Franchises?

Learning and development is a major growth driver for a retail business with multiple franchises. Moreover, we cannot turn a blind eye to the truth that the retail industry faces a high frontline turnover. If the frontline workforce does not experience growth within the company, they quickly search for options. 

McKinsey & Company found out that the annual turnover among frontline retail workers has been at least 60% for a long time. 

Amidst the war for talent, a retail multi-franchise business can’t afford to lose talented professionals and go through the entire hiring, onboarding and training process from scratch. 

Therefore, it is paramount to give frontline employees growth opportunities within the company. 

Creating a frontline training culture can help a multi-franchise business in: 

• Laying a solid foundation that all the frontline employees can follow 
• Unlocking the full potential of the frontline employees 
• Maintaining information uniformity throughout the organization 
• Ensuring customer satisfaction at all branches 
• Maintaining a performance-based culture across the franchises 

How to make frontline training relevant throughout the business 

Planning is the key to creating frontline training programs for a multi-franchise business. Ad-hoc training often fails to succeed, especially when multiple franchises are involved. That’s why it is crucial to plan the entire frontline learning journey for capability building. 

From identifying the frontline training areas to setting up a process to learn on the job,it is crucial to maintain uniformity in all the franchises associated with the business. Even a giant like Titan focuses on making frontline learning relevant across all the franchises by maintaining consistency through a streamlined learning process. 

Gurkirandeep Singh, Head- Talent Management, Learning and organizational development, Titan, India, shares how they maintain consistency throughout their business by offering the same frontline training, tools and resources to employees across all the franchises. This way, they can ensure unified capability building at their store and franchises spread over different cities of India. 

Check out the full conversation of the L&D expert with our Sales Director, Abhijit Rao, and L&D Advisor and Strategist, Sunita Arora, for helpful tips on making learning relevant through the organization.