The international division of Focus Brands has announced a partnership with Auxis, a consulting and outsourcing firm, to inaugurate its first international franchise operations support center. The Customer Experience Center of Excellence (CECE) will be located in Heredia, Costa Rica. CECE’s job will be to provide an affordable and effective means to deliver world-class customer service and ultimately, improve the performance of all franchisees.
“Our job is to help our franchisees amplify their success. The CECE allows us to have eyes and ears into their operations, greatly enhancing our ability to achieve this goal” says Beto Guajardo, president of Focus Brands International.
“Never before have we had the employee bandwidth or the resources to visit over 1,850 stores in 63 countries on a regular basis,” said Jim Holthouser, CEO of Focus Brands LLC.
“The CECE is an incredible advancement in operations and training that came together at the perfect time. These new virtual capabilities will undoubtedly shape the future of global franchising.”
Customer experience coaches will make use of software developed with RizePoint. The coach will perform an Operations Excellence Review (OER), and the software will contain all of the brand guidelines and standards as well as data analysis tools and performance dashboards.
“RizePoint’s quality management platform automates OER tasks, the operational data collection for each coaching session and provides the built-in business intelligence needed to perform the analysis and quickly execute recommendations,” said Kari Hensien, president and CEO of RizePoint.
“Focus Brands International’s innovative approach to conducting OERs will enable quality assurance and global consistency in meaningful and measurable ways at every location.”
The food service brands franchisor teamed up with Auxis to create a shared international model and a team of trained, multi-lingual customer experience coaches. The coaches will virtually perform OER’s with store owners four to six times a year at their locations during business hours in their own native language.
“We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Focus Brands to help execute on their innovative vision for delivering world-class operations support,” said Raul Vega, founder and CEO of Auxis.
“The CECE will enable the ability to collect the facts and figures that contribute to operational success in a way that is affordable, achievable and a game-changer in the industry. We now have the unique ability to provide analytical insights that will help correlate store improvements to financial performance, from one central location.”
