Community Cloud helps Papa Murphy’s franchises perfect their recipe for success.

“It takes a village to open a store,” said Jenni Doyle, Director of Information and Technical Services at Papa Murphy’s — the largest take-and-bake pizza chain in the United States. With more than 1,500 franchise locations nationwide, Papa Murphy’s differs from other fast food chains in that its stores offer fresh, hand-crafted pizzas ready for customers to bake at home. From technology partners to designers to project managers, launching a franchise requires a multitude of people working together, and there needs to be transparency across the entire process. “It’s really important that everybody stays in sync with where things are,” she said. The year 2014 was a big one for Papa Murphy’s: It surpassed the 1,400-location mark and it went public. To keep up with its unprecedented growth, Papa Murphy’s turned to Salesforce and Community Cloud to launch Pathway — an internal community that brings franchisees and their entire operations team together to coordinate every step of the store launch, from location scouting to opening day. It offers 360-degree visibility into the entire process, including task allocation and progress. But it wasn’t always such a seamless process. In the past, everyone tracked their tasks on individual spreadsheets. “When we looked at the process, we said, ‘This just isn’t scalable, and it just doesn’t pass our logic test,’” said Doyle. “You’re not going to have consistency if you have 17 groups using 17 different spreadsheets.” “Now, when we introduce new steps into the process, we no longer have to hunt down those 17 spreadsheets,” she said. “With just a few clicks or swipes, we can update one template, and everyone is aware of their new tasks.” Since all relevant documents are built into the Pathway community — including quick reference guides, FAQs, and task-related forms — the amount of email going back and forth is reduced even further.

Papa Murphy’s was already using Sales Cloud to track and manage the full lifecycle of franchise leads, so adding Community Cloud was a natural choice. Its simplicity and ease of integration with third-party apps such as TaskRay from Salesforce’s AppExchange sealed the deal. Papa Murphy’s also added a suggestion box in Pathway, so team members can suggest new features to continuously improve the community and processes. “With Community Cloud,” said Doyle, “we’ve been able to turn around enhancements really fast.” Future plans include evolving Pathway to support other store lifecycle events, such as remodels and relocations, and potentially expanding it into other parts of the business. Papa Murphy’s also uses Marketing Cloud for two key functions: “One is to support the franchise sales process — communications with leads and opportunities,” explained Doyle. “And we also use Marketing Cloud to communicate directly with our customers with coupons, offers, and product information.” Indeed, opening a franchise is a lot like herding cats. There are so many tasks, people, and processes to keep in sync. For Papa Murphy’s, Community Cloud significantly streamlines the process, providing a unified dashboard of more than 400 tasks, 15–20 spreadsheets, and a team of people. “With Community Cloud, we took a process that seemed so complicated and so overwhelming, and we made it really simple,” added Doyle.