Franchisee Experience Strategy

Restaurants Brands International (RBI), the parent company of Burger King, Popeyes, and Tim Hortons wanted to rethink the end-to-end journey of their customers (franchisees) to improve their digital experience. As a part of large-scale digital transformation, Corp IT and C-suite wanted to rethink all digital platforms, tools, and experiences provided to franchisees by RBI. My team executed a multi-stream design strategy exercises running in parallel:

1. Franchisee Journey Mapping

2. Current State Intranet Heuristic Analysis

3. Current State Site Development Tool Heuristic Analysis

4. Platform Assessment

5. Franchisee tech - competitive benchmarking

6. Concepts of new franchisee digital experiences

Franchisee Journey Map

Our teams in partnership with RBI created a project brief that outlined the following objectives and questions

• What is the current franchisee experience for all three brands while using corp IT digital solutions?

• Who are our franchisees? Are there differences between small mom & pop franchisees vs. large or corporate ones?

  • 2100 franchisee owners

  • 25,000 Franchise locations

  • 30,000 Restaurant Mangers

  • 500,000 Restaurant workforce

• How do they use RBI systems and how does it help them run their business effectively?

• What are their pain points?

• What are the unmet needs?

• How can we become better than other franchisors and become the best franchisor to work with?

To map the journey our researchers spoke with 22 franchisees, 12 RBI stakeholders, and 11 technical digital platform SMEs

Remote user interviews due to COVID-19

Journey Map

Recommendations and Insights

Enterprise Applications Heuristic Analysis

Our team plotted 36 franchisee facing applications and prioritized applications to audit based on what was going to be fixed on the 2021 IT roadmap. Communications portal was the central piece to all franchisee resources and we started with all three portals for the three brands. The next biggest portal that made business impact was the site development portals which directly tied to the growth of the business and there was a lot of business pain-points that needed to be solved.

Current State Application Demos and Usability Interviews

My team did an in-depth analysis in a 50 page report deconstructing the portal using an assessment rubric and then scoring each brand portal across these parameters. Some highlights of the report below.

Franchisee Intranet Portal Analysis

All brands had a nuanced way of tracking site development and was mostly a manual process where the field team was getting updates from the franchisees on-site and then entering the information on different portals. Tracking new restaurants being built is one of the biggest business KPIs and since franchisees were predominantly in charge of constructing the restaurants RBI had a hard time predicting how many restaurants would open in a year. This assessment looked at the tools and process to get more visibility into the site development process. Team created a 25 page report, some highlights below

Experience Design Concepts

Based on user-research, journey map, app audits, competitive analysis and business objectives with created 3 concepts to show art-of-the-possible and help C-suite understand what kind of experience impact and Digital Transformation exercise could make if we took a franchisee-centric approach to develop the IT infrastructure.

Portal re-imagined

Consolidated Finance apps (from 5 apps to 1)

Site Development and Document Center (net new experience recommended)