Managing their franchisees through the cloud, Gaibom powers up!

Gaibom is a chain of traditional Chinese cuisine, specializing in the Taiwanese delicacy “luwei”. Utlizing the freshest ingredients it has grown to incorporate franchised stores all over Taiwan and now even overseas.

Synchronization and unity to the management of chain stores. “Many of our franchisees have run their stores for a long time and it grows with them and their families as they get married and have children. Because Gaibom supports so many families as part of its own family the efficacy of the head office in leading the franchises is of key importance,” says Chairman Wang of Wang Changfa Industries Limited, which has over a hundred branches all over Taiwan and Penghu, and even a branch in Beijing. The key to success for the company has been to keep a high level of consistency by careful management and by sending internal instructors to all of its franchises. “Customers recognize the Gaibom logo so every branch’s quality is important.

To keep an open door for its franchisees, Gaibom operates a special call center where franchisees can speak directly to specialists about any questions or concerns they may have. Further, company holds an annual conference where they provide additionally resources to the franchisees, as well as information about events and new products. “Not only do we answer their calls, but we reach out directly to our franchisees to make sure we’re doing everything we can to ensure their success.”

Due to a lack of staff and funding, Gaibom formerly used Excel to keep track of its franchisees and their issues. However, this system lacked consistency and was dependent on the thoroughness of individual workers. Realizing the need for change, Gaibom began using Vis-a-Vis’s Cloud based report management service. After a single day, the entire customer support staff was capable of using Vis-a-Vis. Before, the support staff needed spend a lot of time manually and repeatedly formatting and inputting information times into Excel. By using Vis-a-Vis Gaibom improved its efficiency by leaps and bounds, with custom-tailored report formatting and cloud based access.

Under their old system, each branch of Gaibom maintained a single Excel file which contained updates from every angle of the business. “It was too much of a hassle to have many Excel files.” However, using a single file was very unwieldy, especially in dealing with reports in different categories.

Vis-a-Vis makes categorization easy and customizable. The Indicator functions allows reports to be broken down into sections like “Orders”, “Budget”, “Customer Service”, or whatever else is needed. Built in search functions allow relevant results to be found in seconds. Need to find all “Budget” reports in the last six months? Vis-a-Vis puts it a mouse-click away. Chairman Wang adds, “I can find the sources of difficulties in every branch for the last three months or use the search feature to see how many repair…reports have been filed. When I click on the “Order” indicator I can instantly see all of the order reports filed by my various branches. Vis-a-Vis is really intuitive to use!”

「Vis-a-Vis, cloud based report management service, has powerful import and export features that integrate it into every business process. Choosing the fields they want, managers are able to export regular reports that can be integrated with analytics tools for better analysis. Vis-a-Vis makes the transition a breeze. Legacy reports can be instantly uploaded from their Excel files into Vis-a-Vis and integrated into the new system. No more confusion caused by multiple versions of the same file as Vis-a-Vis keeps copies of every change and conveniently orders them by date. One of the great strengths of the Vis-a-Vis' service is its availability on a variety of platforms: mobile, tablet, and PC, placing managers fingers on the pulse of their business.

“Vis-a-Vis allows for the customization of report forms. All relevant fields are already optimized by IT before customer service uses it. For Gaibom, which needs to track the problems and requirements of its franchisees, this has made the entire process much easier.” Chairman Wang enthuses. He emphasizes that Gaibom’s need to keep close track of its branches has increased as it expands abroad with stores like its franchise in Beijing. Vis-a-Vis gives Gaibom the tools to ensure the highest degree of consistency no matter where in the world it operates.

With every update instantly uploaded into the cloud, everyone stays on the same page. Managers have immediate access to information like the number of calls received or problems that have arisen, allowing them to more efficiently direct their resources. “As records are being updated constantly into Vis-a-Vis it’s easy to keep abreast of new developments or problems. This allows our head to deploy the best assets to assist our branches. When we were using Excel it was simply too difficult to keep track of everything in real-time,” says Chairman Wang.

With superior support and continual updates improving and adding new features to the service, Vis-a-Vis has become an integral part of many small and medium sized enterprises’ business.