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The Woodhouse Day Spa Brings Usability and Control to its Franchisees
Client: The Woodhouse Day Spa
The Woodhouse Day Spa has full service, luxury day spas in locations across the country. One of the fastest growing spa businesses, The Woodhouse is rapidly expanding with more than 200 new franchises under contract.
Challenge:
The Woodhouse had many sites for franchises, but those sites weren't unified in branding, easily updated or integrated into their spa management systems. The Woodhouse Day Spa website wasn't delivering the high quality experience its visitors expected and limited their franchisees' online capabilities.
Lack of Control and Integration
The Woodhouse had no ability to make global changes, which was impacting their ability to provide consistent branding as they grew and more and more franchise sites were added. Additionally, franchise owners were unable to make changes to much of the content on their individual sites. Franchisees could not update their own blog posts, news items, pricing, photo galleries or even event schedules. When changes were able to be made, they had to go through corporate IT to edit the custom code and were subject to change fees to support that work. Because of the burden this placed on corporate resources, these updates, no matter how time sensitive, could take days.
In addition, franchise owners had no ability to manage their own, local search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. They had no ability to target local markets through SEO or to leverage search engine marketing if they wished to.
Highly Manual Processes
Though gift cards were available for online purchase, they could not be purchased through the local franchise sites. Instead, gift cards could only be purchased through the corporate site, forcing visitors to leave the franchise site in order to complete the transaction. Gift card fulfillment was not automated and required a full-time employee to manually process each purchase.
Without control, integration or automation, The Woodhouse Day Spa could not keep up with its rapidly growing business. They needed a central platform would enable them to maintain and update franchise sites as well as the corporate site, and also provided the ability for franchises to manage content on each of their sites. The Woodhouse Day Spa turned to the Bates Creative Group to create a high-impact design for the new web presence and Unleashed Technologies to develop a robust platform to help them meet their objectives.
Solution:
Unleashed Technologies developed an enterprise platform that easily scales to accommodate The Woodhouse’s explosive growth, as they take the company from 30 to more than 200 franchises. Leveraging Drupal 7, Unleashed Technologies developed an enterprise platform that would empower The Woodhouse and its franchisees to control and manage their content, unify all sites by integrating key systems, and increase revenues through improved user experience and SEO capabilities. With this new platform, Unleashed Technologies delivered:
- Instant franchise site creation capabilities
- The ability for The Woodhouse corporate site administrators to push content to and pull content from franchise sites
- Tiered levels of access at the corporate and franchise levels to ensure the right people have control over content
- Real-time web services for continual content sharing
- Comprehensive integration into spa management systems
- Technical best practices for SEO management
- Integration into spa management systems to provide a seamless experience to visitors
- Fully customizable gift cards available for purchase from franchise sites
Throughout the development of this platform, Unleashed Technologies worked closely with Bates Creative Group to ensure that the technology supported the design and user experience.
Results:
Unleashed Technologies improved site management and developed key integrations that now enable The Woodhouse and its franchisees to:
- Ease content management across all websites for corporate employees and franchisees with tiered levels of access to ensure brand consistency and timely updates
- Reduce costs by eliminating manual gift card processes
- Increase revenue with online reservation booking, and the ability to target local markets through SEO/SEM
- Improve engagement with social media functionality, wish lists, blogs, news feeds, photo galleries and event schedules
- Continue to innovate on a technologically advanced, highly flexible platform
Building on the high impact design provided by Bates Creative Group, all sites are fully integrated into spa management systems to provide a seamless experience to visitors. With this enterprise web platform, The Woodhouse Day Spa can now instantly create franchise sites that are consistent in branding and content, yet managed and updated by the franchisee. With this enterprise web platform, The Woodhouse is able to better engage web visitors and successfully grow the business.