Challenge

• The Häagen-Dazs Shoppe Company, the franchisor of Häagen-Dazs Ice Cream Shops, needed a CRM system to manage its franchises and ramp up development and sales opportunities
• Its Shops team includes executives, real estate development, marketing, and a field team of Franchise Business Managers who support and inspect hundreds of domestic franchise stores on a regular basis; this geo-dispersed team needed a better way to communicate and collaborate on daily operations, campaigns and store development
• An Excel spreadsheet was used to manage and track franchise leads; an Access database housed existing agreements and franchisee data but was tenuous to access remotely via VPN
• With franchises to manage nationwide, the company needed a solution easily accessible by remote workers
• The unique nature of the business meant customization was a key requirement

Solution

• Häagen-Dazs selected Salesforce over a proprietary in-house CRM solution
• With help from salesforce.com partner Reside, the company deployed and customized Salesforce in less than six months
• Force.com's connect for Microsoft Outlook integrates Salesforce with Microsoft Outlook contacts, calendaring, and business cases for simple information access
• The company extended the functionality of Salesforce into Franchiseforce by building custom tabs including the following:
  • Häagen-Dazs University, a training component used to track which franchises have attended training
  • Defaults, which tracks which Shops failed inspections
  • Openings, to follow the opening process for new construction
  • Real Estate Leads, used to match new franchise owners with a potential Shop location
• Using Salesforce and Google AdWords, Häagen-Dazs can manage its ads and drive potential franchisees to its Web site—all within Salesforce
• Salesforce’s Web-to-lead functionality automates marketing campaigns on www.HaagenDazs.com
• Chatter integrates with the existing Salesforce solution for Franchise Management and is mobile-enabled for working from the field on a smart phone or iPad
• Chatter promotes collaboration between Real Estate, Operations, and Training teams on new shop construction, product development, branding, store inspections, and issue resolution

Results

• Using Salesforce and Google AdWords, Häagen-Dazs has gained 15 additional franchise leads per month
• Salesforce’s model ensures franchise information is easily accessible regardless of where an employee is working from
• Dashboards and reporting capability empower management with greater insight into franchise activity
• The company plans to use case functionality to track franchises that fail inspection
• Chatter adoption has been strong from the executive level through the field
• Product decisions—such as new flavors or special promotions—are being rolled out via Chatter; the team decided upon a national conference location through Chatter
• Customer issues are more quickly addressed and resolved with Chatter
• Photos shared on Chatter allow all teams to see the Häagen-Dazs brand in action across stores