Digitizing the Franchise Experience for a Hospitality Corporation

In the fast-paced world of hospitality, hotel franchises offer a unique business model that allows entrepreneurs to establish their own hotels, while benefiting from a recognized brand name and the hotel’s existing systems. However, the success of a franchise heavily relies on efficient operations and seamless communication between the franchisor and franchisees throughout the entire process of opening and running a franchise.

A leading hospitality corporation was seeking a single, scalable platform to digitize and automate its franchise experience and remove time-consuming manual processes. The hospitality corporation collaborated with CapTech to develop a comprehensive solution leveraging Salesforce and MuleSoft that provided a simplified, efficient experience for hotel staff and franchisees.

The hospitality corporation’s existing franchise sales process was slow and heavily reliant on email communication, resulting in inaccurate data in systems of record. Applicants lacked visibility into their application status and had to contact their developer for updates. This created frustration and delays in the franchise sales cycle.

The manual processes caused disconnects between the franchise and finance teams, leading to inaccuracies in billing, which ultimately resulted in substantial revenue loss. Poor data quality also led to reporting errors and reduced visibility in the franchise opening and contract negotiation process.

Additionally, the hospitality corporation’s legacy franchise management system was unable to scale with company growth and struggled to accurately track franchisees with ownership interest in multiple properties.

The project began with a Salesforce implementation to replace the legacy franchise management system. The new solution leveraged Salesforce Sales & Service Cloud paired with Experience Cloud to serve as an external portal for franchise owners and applicants. The CapTech team utilized MuleSoft to integrate the client’s Salesforce instance with its existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software.

CapTech conducted an assessment and Salesforce process implementation of the hospitality corporation’s core sales cycle from lead entry through contract execution. The team also implemented self-service capabilities that enabled applicants to complete their franchise application and franchise disclosure documents (FDDs) through a custom portal using Experience Cloud.

To ensure a seamless transition to the new system, the CapTech team provided customized training guides and conducted live training for users both in-person and virtually.

The solution:

• Streamlined the owner experience and ensured compliance by automating the franchise disclosure and due diligence processes, including automated disclosure receipt tracking.
• Increased speed-to-market through an owner’s portal with automated processes that enabled fully digital onboarding.
• Enabled the hospitality corporation’s legal teams to draft contracts quickly and accurately through Salesforce’s integration with DocuSign that generates draft franchise agreements.
• Improved decision-making by providing holistic visibility of the owner through Salesforce reporting and complex ownership structure management, allowing for data-driven insights and actions.
• Improved billing accuracy and streamlined contract management by leveraging integrations with the client’s ERP to automate customer and billing set up, reducing a multi-hour manual process to a single button-click.