Keeping everything together with the Ziik hub

About the company

Access4Lofts is a nationwide British franchise company offering loft ladder installations to homeowners. Their promise to customers is to help them utilise unused loft space with a quick, easy and affordable loft ladder installation, creating a useful loft storage space.

The company has used a franchise model to expand across the U.K., and now has 54 franchisees covering 70 territories. In all, they complete around 1000 loft projects a month. Access4Lofts recently brought all their employees and franchisees together on Ziik, where they share all of their instruction videos and other crucial franchise system information.

Here, Founder, Co-owner and Director of Access4Lofts, Lindsay Brown, shares her experiences with the platform.

Challenges before Ziik

"We're a franchise business, and as such, we have processes for everything. As we grew, we realised that our internal communication was in need of streamlining, too, and that we needed to keep everything, all of our information, in one place. We had lots of good processes, but they were spread across different channels.”

Requirements for a new solution

“First and foremost, we knew that our new solution needed to be easily accessible. And that meant that it had to be accessible on a smartphone, it had to be app-based. We even considered developing our own app. But then Ziik was recommended to us by The Franchising Centre, and considering that it was off-the-shelf and almost a perfect fit for us as such, it was quite an easy choice. Especially when we realised we could have it branded in Access4Lofts design.”

Results

“Simply put, Ziik has become an operations hub for us.

Uploading all of our content was easy, but it did take a while. Now that the content is in, we’re finding lots of new uses for it.

Ziik has excited us as franchisors about sharing all franchise concept information with our franchisees. It brings a lot of positivity and streamlines our internal communications, and our franchisees no longer get millions of e-mails from us, now that we have everything in one place.

That’s the beauty of Ziik, everything is on the phone.

We use the news feed for things like breaking news and important announcements. We also use it for what we call Motivational Mondays. That’s usually a quote, intended to remind our franchisees of the support they have available to them. We also have Top Tip Tuesdays, where we share simple tips for running a franchise. Things like, ‘Are you making the most of our referral system?´, or, ‘Don’t forget to update your Google business profile’. Just helpful tips for very busy people.

Working with the Ziik team in Denmark is great. They’ve been brilliant, and they respond very quickly when we need them. I'd definitely recommend Ziik."