Automation that allows a brand to be more local-customer-centric and improve internal efficiencies without impacting day-to-day operations gives its franchisees an advantage over competitors. Data shows customer relationships are most likely to begin online with 87% of consumers posting comments or questions for businesses, however only 31% report that responses from businesses were quick, and less than 50% report being satisfied with those responses.

Kumon Learning Centers of North America has enabled its learning centers to tune into their local marketing data and free up time using SOCi Genius and CoMarketing solutions. The brand’s previous marketing vendor did not allow Kumon to manage local listings, social media posts, or reviews in one place. Franchisees were tasked with most of the local marketing responsibility and very little data to understand if their efforts were working – resulting in a 29% social response rate.

“Our team can focus more on other tasks since SOCi Genius makes it quicker and easier to respond. Rather than spending a whole day or two looking through comments, we can put our efforts into other projects.” – Sarah Eveland, Kumon Branding Specialist

Since integrating SOCi’s Genius AI, the response rate is 57% and trending upward. “Local managers now don’t have to respond to social media comments because Genius Social does it for them. We spent a lot of time responding to social media engagements before Genius Social, but often, with the overall bandwidth of our centers, it was not common to see comments responded to as much as we can now,” noted Eveland.

SOCi’s Genius and CoMarketing Cloud offerings have improved efficiency in Kumon’s Branding department so the team can now focus more time on supporting franchisees with local marketing strategy. Kumon resolved 95% of reviews with Genius Reviews with an average response time of 1 day and 10 hours. Because Kumon’s reviews are centralized, Genius Reviews has allowed the company to allocate staff away from review response management to different areas of the business where they can provide more value.

SOCi Genius makes it simple to create personalized responses that connect with customers and encourage more engagement as Genius Reviews aligns with Kumon-specific lingo and automatically provides a range of review responses.

SOCi Results

Kumon is growing franchisee adoption across its 2,000 locations and utilizes SOCi data to help business owners learn more about their local markets, ultimately giving Kumon’s franchisees an advantage proven by the following stats: