Why Aren’t Franchises Talking About This?
A few days ago, I did something that says more about me than I’d like to admit.
Instead of binge-watching The Rookie, like a functioning adult, I spent several hours listening to panel discussions featuring some of the sharpest minds in franchising.
I know. I need a hobby.
The conversations were genuinely good. Coaching franchisees. Leadership. Operational consistency. KPIs. Field support. Accountability. Culture. Peer groups. Growth. Scorecards. Boundaries. Trust.
If you’d handed me a franchise buzzword bingo card, I’d have been shouting BINGO before the first sponsor break.
Every one of those topics matters. I’m not being cute about that. But as I listened, I kept waiting for someone to ask one particular question.
It never came. The question is…
What experience is the customer actually having?
The question hiding underneath every franchise conversation
Before anyone sharpens their pitchforks: I’m not suggesting these leaders don’t care about customer experience. The opposite. Every person on those panels is deeply committed to helping franchisees succeed. Their work is thoughtful, practical, and clearly moving the needle.
That’s exactly what made me pause. Because every improvement they discussed exists for one reason. Not to create better coaching. Not to improve scorecards. Not to standardize KPIs. Not even to build stronger franchisees. Those are all means to an end.
The end is an experience so consistently remarkable that customers come back, tell their friends, leave glowing reviews, and become loyal advocates for the brand.
Somewhere along the way, we got so good at improving the machine that we stopped talking about what the machine is supposed to produce. We have built franchise systems capable of producing the identical sandwich in four thousand locations — and the identical shrug in all of them.
Operational consistency is the vehicle. Emotional consistency is the destination.
Here’s the uncomfortable part. Consistency, the thing franchising is famous for, is exactly where franchise customer experience quietly falls apart.
I know this because I’ve sat in the room while a brand discovered it.
The pizza brand that didn’t have a systems problem
In 2024, I was brought in by a national pizza franchise. I can’t name them, which is a shame, because you’ve eaten their pizza.
The complaint was simple and familiar: the reviews were all over the place. Same brand, same product, same manual — and a customer’s experience depended entirely on which door they happened to walk through. So we did the thing everyone does first. We went looking for the broken system.
We didn’t find one.
The systems were fine. The training existed. The operations manual on point. What was inconsistent wasn’t the process — it was the behaviour inside the process. It varied between markets. It varied between stores. It varied between managers inside the same market, on the same street, selling the same pizza.
And here’s the part that should make every franchisor uncomfortable:
Nobody was doing anything wrong.
That’s the trap. You cannot hold someone accountable to a standard that was never written down. The manual had jurisdiction over the pizza. Nobody had jurisdiction over the feeling.
The systems weren’t failing. They just had no authority over the only thing the customer actually remembers.
Every location. Every interaction. Every time.
When I delivered the keynote at their franchisee conference, I gave it a title that was really just a promise:
Every Location. Every Interaction. Every Time: The Five Behaviours That Turn Franchise Systems Into Brand Experiences.
You could feel the light go on.
Not because five behaviours are magic. Because five behaviours are nameable. For the first time, the room had words for the thing they’d all been vaguely gesturing at for years.
Afterward, the CEO told me what he valued most wasn’t the framework itself. It was the shared language. That’s the whole unlock, and I want to be precise about why.
A shared language creates accountability. You cannot coach what you cannot name. You cannot benchmark what you cannot name. You cannot correct a franchisee in Calgary and a shift lead in Winnipeg using the same standard if the standard lives only in your head.
Give the behaviour a name, and suddenly it can be trained, measured, coached, praised, and — critically — expected.
Their real discovery came next. Once those five behaviours were named, the brand could finally benchmark the customer touchpoints against how customers emotionally felt about the brand.
Read that again. They weren’t measuring whether the checklist got done. They were measuring whether the feeling got delivered.
That is emotional consistency, made operational.
And it turns out customers were keeping score the whole time. PwC’s customer experience research has consistently found that roughly one in three consumers will walk away from a brand they love after a single bad experience. Not a pattern of bad experiences. One.
Meanwhile, companies with strong brand consistency routinely attribute a meaningful slice of revenue growth — often cited in the 10–20% range — directly to that consistency. So the stakes are clear. What’s less clear is what we’re actually trying to make consistent. Because the answer isn’t the pizza.
Nobody has ever complimented your inventory management
Years ago, while managing hotels and restaurants, I learned a lesson that never left me.
Guests never complimented us on how accurately we completed the opening checklist. Not once did a guest stop at the front desk on the way out and say, “Honey, wait — I have to tell them… Excuse me… your inventory management? Spectacular!“
They talked about how someone made them feel.
They remembered the server who anticipated a need before they asked for it. The front desk agent who welcomed them by name. The employee who solved a problem without making them feel like one.
Those moments weren’t accidents. They were the result of intentional operations.
That’s the piece we keep dropping. Great operations don’t create consistency. Great operations create consistency in how people feel.
That is a very different conversation. And it’s the one I want franchise leaders to start having.
The standing ovation is not for the stage manager
Maybe this is why my background in live theatre shapes how I see business.
When an audience rises to its feet at the end of a show, they are not applauding the lighting cues. No audience in the history of the theatre has ever leapt up, tears streaming, screaming, “BRAVO! THE STAGE MANAGER!“
They’re applauding the experience.
And here’s the irony that should keep every franchise operator up at night: that unforgettable experience was only possible because every cue, every rehearsal, every backstage process, and every cast member executed exactly as designed.
The systems made the feeling possible. Then the systems disappeared. That’s the whole job. Build the machine so well that the customer never sees it — they only feel what it produces.
Your operations manual is a script. Your training is rehearsal. Your franchisees are the company. And your customer? Your customer is the audience, and they have never once cared how hard it was backstage.
We’re asking the wrong question
Listening to those franchise experts, I realized they were all circling variations of the same question:
“How do we create better franchisees?”
It’s a great question. It’s just not the last question.
The one underneath it is:
“How do we create more unforgettable customer and employee experiences?”
Those two questions do not always produce the same answers.
A franchise can have impeccable operational standards and still feel cold. It can post perfect scorecards and deliver forgettable service. It can hit every KPI on the board and still get dumped.
Because customers don’t leave over a missed KPI. They leave over a feeling — and they usually don’t tell you first.
Why emotional consistency is worth actual money
This isn’t a soft argument dressed up in theatre metaphors. The numbers are blunt.
Research from Motista, widely cited in Harvard Business Review, found that emotionally connected customers are roughly 52% more valuable than customers who are merely “highly satisfied.” A follow-on retail study put emotionally connected customers at a 306% higher lifetime value, with an average customer lifespan of 5.1 years versus 3.4, and a recommendation rate of 71% against 45%.
Read that again, because it’s the entire argument in one line:
“Satisfied” is not the ceiling. It’s the floor.
“Satisfied” means the sandwich was correct and nothing went wrong. “Satisfied” means the member got what they expected from the workout. “Satisfied” is what your scorecard measures. And “satisfied” customers will leave you for a coupon.
Emotional connection is what your operations are supposed to be manufacturing. We’ve just never put it on the scorecard.
The Emotional Consistency Test
So try this. Walk into any location in your system, anywhere in the country, and instead of auditing the checklist, ask five questions:
- Confidence — Does the customer feel the same certainty that this brand knows what it’s doing?
- Welcome — Does the customer feel noticed as a person, or processed as a transaction?
- Trust — Does the customer believe a problem here would be handled, not defended?
- Ease — Does the customer feel like the system is working for them, or that they’re working the system?
- Promise — Does the customer walk out feeling the brand delivered on what it implied at the door?
If the answer changes from unit to unit, you don’t have a brand. You have a logo with franchisees attached.
How to actually build franchise customer experience consistency
Four moves, in order:
1. Name the feeling you’re in business to produce. Not your values. Not your mission statement. One feeling. If your leadership team can’t say it in a sentence, your crew in unit 74 has no chance.
2. Reverse-engineer operations from the feeling backward. Every SOP and every touchpoint should be traceable to the emotion it protects. If a process doesn’t ladder up to the feeling, you’re maintaining it out of habit.
3. Measure the feeling, not just the compliance. Audits tell you whether the show was performed. They don’t tell you whether it moved anybody. Add one emotional metric to the scorecard and watch what changes.
4. Cast for it. Then rehearse it. You cannot train warmth into someone you hired for availability. And you cannot expect opening night to go well if nobody ran the scene.
Operational excellence isn’t the enemy of experience. It is the only reliable way to deliver one at scale. The theatre figured this out four hundred years ago. Franchising is close.
The line I’d put on the wall
Coaching matters. Leadership matters. Operations absolutely matter.
But only if they add up to an experience worth remembering.
Because customers don’t fall in love with systems.
They fall in love with how those systems make them feel.
Operational consistency is the vehicle. Emotional consistency is the destination. And the standard — the one that pizza brand now has words for — fits on a single line:
Every location. Every interaction. Every time.
Now go check what your machine is actually producing.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is franchise customer experience? Franchise customer experience is the sum of how customers feel at every touchpoint across a franchise system — not just what they receive. It’s distinct from operational consistency, which measures whether procedures were followed. A franchise can have perfect operations and inconsistent customer experience.
Why is customer experience inconsistent across franchise locations? Because most systems standardize actions rather than outcomes. Training, SOPs, and audits are point-in-time interventions against a continuously drifting baseline of staffing, turnover, and local management. Without a defined emotional outcome, each unit interprets “good service” for itself.
What is emotional consistency? Emotional consistency means a customer feels the same confidence, welcome, and trust at every location in the system, regardless of geography or operator. It’s the destination that operational consistency is supposed to deliver you to.
Does customer experience actually affect franchise revenue? Yes. Research cited by Harvard Business Review found emotionally connected customers are approximately 52% more valuable than merely satisfied customers, with substantially longer tenure and higher recommendation rates. Conversely, PwC research has found roughly one in three customers will abandon a brand they love after a single bad experience.
How do you measure customer experience in a franchise system? Go beyond compliance audits. Measure variance in satisfaction between your best and worst units, add at least one emotional metric to the scorecard, and test whether the feeling your brand promises is being reproduced at unit level — not just whether the checklist got completed.
Marc Haine helps organizations build operational excellence that customers can actually feel. He is the author of Lights! Camera! Action! — Business Operational Excellence Through the Lens of Live Theatre and the host of the Experience Leadership podcast. Marc dares leaders to be the exception.
Ready to stop improving the machine and start improving the show? [Bring Marc to your next franchise conference →]
Marc Haine
Marc is a service expert and a master of experiences. He's also an author, speaker, facilitator and coach. He will help your teams ignite their passions, enable your leaders to recentre their focus, and drive continuous improvement through connected and engaged employees. This will allow you to realize your competitive advantage with a connected purpose and consistency of customer experience across your brand. He will dare your people to cultivate a generous attitude and lead with love and kindness first.
