Franchisors face greater training challenges than other businesses. The parent company must train a geographically dispersed, often international, franchisee workforce with a coherent, cost-effective program that yields a highly motivated, skilled and loyal workforce. For corporate branding, the franchise training program should instill a uniform set of performance standards for customer service across its many chain operations. A franchisor must centralize control of corporate training, and at the same time, localize training programs for each region.

A franchisor must centralize control of corporate training, and at the same time, localize training programs for each region.

Franchisors realize their success depends on high-quality employee performance, and that depends on high-quality training. To meet this demand, franchises create, print, and ship tons of communication materials. Most of a franchise’s paper-based training documentation is left unread, quickly becomes obsolete and requires frequent replacement with new product introduction information. Franchise companies incur high costs in creating and delivering paper-based training documentation, but still lack a way to accurately monitor and certify employee knowledge retention.

Since employee turnover is characteristically high among chain stores and new franchise stores constantly are coming on board, the parent company must plan to educate a constantly changing workforce. Training, fast and efficient, must be in place to orient the new employee to the business procedures of the franchise. Creating company loyalty in situations where franchise companies may have multiple brands makes a difficult situation even more challenging.

Not only is the quality of training a constant challenge for franchise corporations, but the costs involved are a major drain on bottom-line profitability. Companies spend more money on transporting and housing trainees than on actual training programs, with approximately 66 percent of training costs going to travel expenses. Traditional live classroom-based training is fast becoming out-dated and ineffectual in the context of a global economy. It is becoming much too costly and cumbersome to serve the needs of worldwide franchise organizations. Time spent away from the job sitting in a classroom is a tremendous drain on productivity and revenue per employee.

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing franchise training is the need to certify that employees have not only passed a training program, but fully comprehended the material as well. Certification training is necessary for the franchise parent company to ensure a uniform and high standard of employee performance worldwide. Certification is a way for a parent company to centralize, standardize, monitor and control its franchise-wide employee and management training programs.

In search of a better answer to costly hard copy materials and live classes, many corporations are beginning to turn to the Internet to meet their training requirements. What is needed, though, is a robust software platform powerful enough to leverage the Internet for highly interactive and easy-to-update online training, scaleable enough for global franchise-wide implementation, and secure enough to ensure certification.

Franchise Training Solution: The Internet

The Internet offers the logical solution for a franchisor’s communications, education, training and testing objectives. Internet or intranet-based certification training and testing allows franchisors to greatly increase reach and control, while reducing delivery costs.

The problem, however, is that many distance learning products lack the knowledge management and security features necessary for a comprehensive online certification solution. To be truly effective, an online franchise training solution must provide tools to measure a trainee’s progress.

IntraLearn Software Corporation has designed a solution for franchise-wide training by focusing also on the unique requirements of certification. IntraLearn is a training management software system designed to make it easy for instructors to place classes onto the Internet securely and consistently. No programming skills are required to load courses. IntraLearn generates a dynamic online classroom, with powerful interactive features that include e-mail, chat, live hyperlinks, discussion rooms, instructor Q&A, FAQ, and streaming multimedia. Using only a standard Internet browser from any location, students may register, take a class, submit tests with immediate scoring, communicate with others and receive certification upon satisfactory completion. In addition, IntraLearn contains unique features required for online certification, such as multilevel security and expanded reporting capabilities. More than just a product, franchise organizations need technology partners who can help them use the Internet to bridge training programs and a global, fast-changing workforce. A number of franchise organizations and companies have established partnerships with IntraLearn to ease the transition to high-quality online courses for franchisors. Two are the IFA Educational Foundation and Streamtrain.com.

IFA Educational Foundation

IntraLearn is teaming with the IFA Educational Foundation to bring the benefits of Internet-based training to IFA members, franchisors, franchisees and suppliers. The IFA Educational Foundation will use IntraLearn software to deliver distance learning and online certification over the Internet to the IFA membership. The Foundation and IntraLearn form a perfect fit. The Foundation is seeking to leverage the worldwide reach of the Internet to expand training and certification and enhance franchising. IntraLearn was designed from the ground up with online certification in mind.

"The mission of the IFA Educational Foundation is to raise the professional standards of franchising through research and education. We have formed the Institute of Certified Franchise Executives (ICFE) to offer courses leading to certification for franchise professionals," said John Reynolds, president, IFA Educational Foundation. "The agreement with IntraLearn will enable the Foundation to leverage the Internet to reach its goal of expanding our educational programs and making them more accessible to all IFA members."

Franchisors realize their success depends on high-quality employee performance, and that depends on high-quality training.

Those companies with the foresight to start deploying Internet-based, self-paced, on-demand training will witness dramatic cost savings, plus a range of other benefits. With IntraLearn they will be able to integrate outside training providers into one easily accessed platform. Database-driven and highly interactive, IntraLearn will enable them to support franchisee networks and mentor programs online. With online training, franchisors will be able to easily update operations manuals and other support documents, and verify that they are received and read.