How platforms are simplifying the franchise experience

A platform's power lies in its ability to simplify, leaving its users more room for strategy and creativity.Crisp, a Salt Lake City-based quick service restaurant (QSR) management platform, simplifies restaurant operations for chains by simplifying restaurant operations for franchises and franchise owners across the US.

As a franchise owner, there are numerous considerations in your go-to-market strategy. Scale and volume are the ultimate goals. To achieve these, every barrier to simplicity is a barrier to success.

Crisp has been operating on Adyen for Platforms to simplify and streamline payments for their customers since 2020. They've experienced the benefits of our two full-service platforms collaborating for maximum customer experience.

As they grew, Crisp experienced the same teething problem many businesses go through when they blend in-person payments with digital. By involving multiple parties doing the same or similar work, they were hampered by a fractured and messy contract experience with varying PSPs.

By switching to Adyen for Platforms (AfP), they could eliminate the challenges of juggling multiple reports and data not being synced. Just as they strive to be the all-in-one platform that does everything in their own market, partnering with a platform built for scale was exactly what Crisp needed.

Employing a payments partner that streamlines and simplifies key processes compliments Crisp's value proposition. Instead of franchisors using multiple providers for menu and staff management, tipping and loyalty tools, gift cards, and payments, they can now manage all this on one platform. The result is a better overall franchisor, franchisee, and customer experience.

Fluid payments technology heightens the experience of restaurant staff and customers in the restaurant. Customers can wrack up rewards upon arrival in restaurants as part of a loyalty scheme integrated into the checkout. All they have to enter is their phone number, and Crisp's system recognizes and rewards them with every transaction.

An integrated tipping solution also makes guest departure and service recognition seamless, Tipping happens on the Customer Facing Display, as seen in the imageat the beginning of the page. The benefits of all-in-one, connected solutions make for intuitive tech experiences that create opportunities for more meaningful encounters between staff and customers.

Crisp's franchisors want to see their restaurants set up quickly and grow through monthly revenue reports with a clear overview of their money. Adyen for Platforms answers both asks by operating a seamless onboarding experience and allowing for neat fee reconciliation for franchisors.

Crisp leverages Adyen for Platforms to provide franchisors a unique royalty fee program. Processes that traditionally involve a number of steps and third-party services are simplified and improved. In just a few clicks, franchisors can have a custom view of their stores, with the calculated varying royalty fees. Should they wish, they can extract their fees for a given period to their own corporate account.

"It's basically three or four clicks for the brand owner in the dashboard to get the royalty fees calculated and money into their account, and that's something really unique," notes RJ. "We cut out three or four jobs by doing this through AfP."

The collaboration with Adyen has allowed Crisp to remove friction from the process, empowering franchisors to record sales, calculate fees, and initiate transfers, all using a single service – a big USP for the QSR brand. Franchisors enjoy a flexible system that allows store level configuration for fees, splitting deposits to separate accounts for easier audits, and instant visibility into transaction statuses.

And what does this mean for sales? Erik Hansen, COO & CFO of Crisp customer,Everbowl, a superfood QSR franchise in the US, spoke to us about the benefits franchisors enjoy when they’re using the platform. “Royalty and Brand Dev fee processing with Crisp has been a dream come true. It has reduced our fee processing from an hours’ long chore, to a minutes-long task,” he notes. “There’s no more having to hunt down money, third-party ACH platforms and fees, and of course - human error! As a simple bonus, the downloadable data makes accounting reconciliation quick and easy.”

The speedier the onboarding process, the better for all parties involved, including the franchisor. The faster the stores are set up, the faster they can see results and plan accordingly.

To see results faster, Crisp automated their onboarding process. When a new store or franchisee is added, the franchisee receives an email saying they have a store. Once the correct KYC information has been uploaded, they send it to Adyen, and then through an API call, the store is created. Since Crisp has been live with Adyen for Platforms, hundreds of stores have been onboarded.

"If the information provided is correct, onboarding takes 10 minutes, and then we ship the hardware," says RJ. The payments terminals, dispatched by Adyen and stored together with the rest of Crisp's tech stack, are delivered along with the rest of the tech stack for the new franchisee to set up.