Three Ways CLEARVIEW Helps You Maintain Brand Standards
For any QSR franchise, one of your most important responsibilities is to uphold brand standards at all times. Every franchise makes an unspoken promise to their customers that no matter what location they walk into, the food quality, service, cleanliness, and overall experience will be the same. A great experience at one store will bode well for all the others down the line. Your restaurant is an individual business while, at the same time, another link in a much larger chain.
For the franchisor, brand standards are about more than maintaining a certain image, they’re also about managing growth. By having a uniform brand standard across the entire franchise network, the head-office will better be able to identify areas for efficiency as well as identifying individual locations that are either under or overperforming. The reasons for these variances can provide valuable insight into what is working and not working at the frontline level.
You may not be fully aware that the CLEARVIEW solution has built-in capabilities to help our customers stay on top of brand standards on a day-to-day basis. Here are three ways CLEARVIEW can help you maintain standards.
Data Normalization
Put simply, data normalization is the ability to quickly and easily compare apples to apples. If corporate wants to see how various menu items are performing across the different regions, they need to know that they are all being prepared and served the same way. That way they can make decisions about keeping or removing these items based on a large performance sample size. CLEARVIEW’s comprehensive tracking and reporting features can provide the kind of granular information necessary to make informed decisions.
The menu is just one aspect of data normalization, another involves the overall margins. If you look at profit margin or stock margin, you want to make sure that the ingredients used to build a menu are coming in under the targets that you’re setting. CLEARVIEW can help to ensure that inventory costs are not rising to the point of eating away at profitability.
Easier Onboarding
A fundamental piece to maintaining brand standards is making sure that all new hires are brought up to speed on operational procedures. CLEARVIEW can integrate these training and review procedures into our basic solution such that it takes the majority of that burden off the franchise owner/manager. This, in turn, makes trainers more efficient and reduces the burden when bringing on new employees than it would be otherwise.
We can also help you stay on top of administrative HR tasks that can easily fall through the cracks. Let’s assume there is a standard based upon company policy that cashiers are reviewed every six months and if this performance review is graded at a certain level, they get an extra percent added to their hourly wage. Upon their hire, CLEARVIEW will schedule these reviews so they don’t get overlooked. With these safeguards in place, you have a system that saves you from exerting time and effort creating and implementing these procedures yourself. These guidelines can be tailored to your particular needs while staying within the confines of the brand standards.
Customer Safety and Cleaning
When we think of brand standards it is easy to focus on food prep and food quality. While they are extremely important, we must not overlook the importance of safety and cleanliness in how it either enhances or detracts from brand standards. Here again, CLEARVIEW has integrated features within the solution that makes it easy to stay on top of these operational requirements.
One way we do this is by providing an interactive checklist that employees can use with a tablet to ensure regular cleaning duties have been attended to. If there was an issue that required attention, they can note on the tablet what they did to correct the issue. Management can monitor that and see if there are any outstanding issues.The same kind of built-in automation can be used in the process of ensuring food safety standards are maintained at all times. For example, a typical practice in this area involves taking and logging the temperatures for food items. When logging temperatures, should the temperature fall outside the acceptable parameters, an alert will be generated and employees will be required to confirm the corrective actions taken. This all but removes the human error factor that can lead to food safety issues.
If you’d like to find out more about ways CLEARVIEW can help maintain brand standards, please reach out anytime.
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