Technology and Franchising
Technology leader Mashable took a look at tech forward franchises. They placed the Zoom Room franchise in the #1 spot on their list of five companies using technology to boost productivity.
Zoom Room has another rather incredible distinction. It was the first business in the world to use an iPad in business. The franchising world is not typically a place where one finds tech innovations. Nor is the pet business world.
But Zoom Room had their iPad mounted on a makeshift stand, long before iPad stands and kiosks were widely available. Everything was already in place on the day the first iPad hit the marketplace.
As Mashable notes of the precociously tech forward franchise, Zoom Room: employing an iPad frees up employees “to answer questions, ring up sales and interact with dogs.”
All of our nationwide locations are required to use a [cellular network] enabled iPad model. In the case of an Internet outage — or even a power outage — we can still run every single aspect of our business from the iPad. Ringing up sales, scheduling appointments, signing people in to classes, etc. Thanks to the long battery life, our entire business can run a full day with no hardware and no electricity. Just the iPad.”
Mark Van Wye, CEO Zoom Room
Running a Tech Forward Franchise
Being the first to use an iPad in business is just the beginning. Zoom Room has remained ahead of the technology curve since inception.
They were one of the first companies to move away from use of Flash on their website. As one of the most tech forward franchises, Zoom Room was one of the first to develop a mobile-first strategy for its website and other online assets.
American Express Open Forum recognizes the Zoom Room Franchise as one of the 7 Most Innovative Small Businesses
The Zoom Room seamlessly integrates all aspects of the business. State-of-the-art software allows franchisees to manage inventory, sales, client records, scheduling, accounting, and more all from a single screen.
Customers are able to conduct every aspect of account management online through Zoom Room’s proprietary code base. And, when it comes to SEO, every Zoom Room location ranks multiple times on the first page of Google search results. That’s for all of the most popular dog-training-related searches.
Algorithms for Tech Forward Franchises
A franchisor has access to data from all of their locations. But the trick is knowing how to analyze large patterns of data. They must consider sales results and the popularity of certain products or services. Of special consideration are pricing structures. Data is the key to all of this.
A perfect example of this is CLV. That’s Customer Lifetime Value. When a company knows this information, it can allocate resources proportionately. Not all customers are created equally. So which offers you incent them with, which types of marketing you employ – all should be driven by CLV.
However, is it impossible to know a client’s CLV until that client’s lifetime has ended? It is not! If your data set is large enough, a franchise or any other business can build an algorithm to predict CLV with a high degree of probability.
Only extremely large companies do this, typically employing an outside data science firm. Either few or no franchises employ such strategies or algorithms.
But the Zoom Room has composed their own algorithm that correctly predicts a client’s future CLV after a mere six weeks from their first visit. And it does so with over a 90% accuracy rate.
Zoom Room has also pioneered in the use of wireless technology, social media integration, and targeted marketing automation. For example, two months prior to Mark Zuckerberg announcing a major change to Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm in February 2018, Zoom Room had already anticipated this change.
They developed their own platform. It allows their clients to post original content to Facebook and other popular social media platforms without any of the “penalties” now visited upon businesses large and small on Facebook.