{{title}}
{{byline}}
{{byline}}
Your franchise development might be underperforming, and it might not have anything to do with weak lead flow or insufficient ad spend.
The real problem could be customer experience at the unit level.
In 2026, the fastest way to improve your closing rate may not be increasing your marketing budget. It may be improving what your franchisees are delivering locally.
More than ever, franchise deals are being derailed during validation. And now, with AI embedded into the franchise buying journey, those local issues are amplified at scale. What used to be a handful of isolated customer complaints can now ripple through your brand reputation in ways that directly affect franchise sales.
There’s significant untapped ROI in improving customer experience not just for same-store sales, but for franchise development.
Trying to grow a franchise system that validates poorly is like bailing water out of a sinking rowboat without fixing the hole in the bottom. You can fill the pipeline with qualified candidates. You can nurture them through discovery days and broker introductions. But once those candidates start talking to franchisees who are frustrated, underperforming, or struggling with local execution, the entire process slows down.
Many franchise sales professionals know this frustration all too well. They work hard to generate interest and move candidates through the process only to lose momentum because they have limited influence over what’s happening inside the units.
This is where a real partnership between franchise development and operations becomes critical.
When development and operations teams work closely together—and when they are supported by real-time performance data, review monitoring tools, and customer experience platforms—they can dramatically change outcomes. Improving performance for even a small number of struggling franchisees can strengthen validation and improve closing rates across dozens of future deals.
But the bigger shift happening right now is technological. The way candidates research franchise brands has changed dramatically in the past few years.
Not long ago, when we talked about candidates researching franchise brands, we meant spending hours on Google searches, reading articles, watching interviews, comparing websites, and talking to brokers. Candidates pieced together information from dozens of sources and slowly formed their impressions of a brand.
Today, research often looks very different. It might mean spending a few minutes with ChatGPT or another large language model (LLM). In the time it takes a candidate to finish a cup of coffee, AI can gather and synthesize information from across the internet.
That includes:
All of that information can be summarized instantly into a few paragraphs that shape a candidate’s perception of your brand. That changes everything.
One of the strongest signals influencing how brands appear in AI-generated responses is aggregated customer sentiment across locations. Every review, every complaint, and every positive experience contributes to the digital picture of your brand.
Consider a very realistic sequence of events: A customer visits one of your franchise locations and has a poor experience. They leave a negative review on Google or another review platform. That review becomes part of the public data environment. LLMs ingest that information as they are trained and updated. Later, a franchise candidate asks some questions:
The AI response incorporates the sentiment signals it has gathered from across the web, including those customer reviews. The answer might determine whether the candidate schedules a call or moves on to another brand entirely.
This isn’t a one-time occurrence. This process happens every day at scale across thousands of AI prompts in every franchise category. What once looked like isolated feedback from a single location is now part of your brand’s system-wide reputation.
Reddit plays an especially interesting role in this new ecosystem. Most major LLMs rely heavily on Reddit as a data source because it is perceived as authentic, user generated, and relatively free from brand marketing influence. Discussions there often carry a lot of weight:
In the AI era, those signals don’t stay buried in a comment thread. They become part of your brand’s digital fingerprint, which directly influences franchise development outcomes.
You can’t outspend a weak customer experience. If local issues persist, they will eventually surface in validation calls, online reviews, Reddit discussions, lender research, and AI-generated brand summaries.
Customer experience is no longer just an operations issue. It’s a franchise development strategy. In the years ahead, the brands that close the most deals won’t be the ones generating the most leads. They will be the ones shaping the data that AI sees by improving the real-world experiences happening inside their locations every day. When candidates start asking machines about your brand, the machines will be listening to your customers.
Jack Monson is the chief growth officer of franchise marketing agency Thunderly and has been working with franchise brands in marketing for more than 15 years. He is also the chair of the IFA’s Marketing & Innovation Committee and the host of Social Geek, the most popular franchise podcast.