Franchise retailers and restaurants just wrapped up their busiest time of year, flooded with order requests, purchases, returns, and takeout orders for holiday parties and cozy nights in.

Needless to say, phones were ringing off the hook – but not every call was answered.

As a franchise owner preparing for the new year, consider leveraging AI to better manage your phone lines and ensure every call – and business opportunity – is captured, especially if you operate multiple locations.

Franchise Times Webinar Recap

Last month, we hosted a Franchise Times webinar with our very own Fiona McEvoy and Ishai Reinfeld. They were joined by special guest Art Sebastian, CEO of NexChapter Inc., who knows firsthand the challenges of dealing with high volumes of customer calls and how voice AI can help.

During Art’s time as an executive at one of the largest convenience store chains in the US – which also happens to be the nation’s 5th largest pizza vendor – he deployed voice AI to handle the 10 million calls the business received annually from customers ordering pizza across its 2,500 locations.

“Voice AI helped us handle 10 million calls across 2,500 locations annually for pizza orders at one of the largest convenience store chains in the US. Voice AI helped us create greater brand message consistency across markets, and we implemented upsell and cross sell across every call.”

Art Sebastian, CEO of NexChapter

In this blog post, we share 12 valuable takeaways from the webinar to help franchise owners successfully deploy voice AI in 2025. To watch the on-demand replay, click here.

Explore Challenges For Today’s Franchises

1. Top challenges and pain points for franchises in 2025.

Art: When you think about labor, there have been many challenges and, particularly around front-line employees, challenges to recruit talent, to onboard them, to retain them, and to optimize the work that they do.

Ishai: We’re also seeing rising customer expectations. Over 70% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and to be able to answer them faster than ever.

2. When it comes to customer service, consistency is key – especially with younger consumers.

Art: The younger consumer is controlling more of the spending. This younger consumer is generally a digital native – they’re used to digital experiences, they’re used to things like self-remediation.

And they also expect an omni-channel experience. And so I just think that you cannot have inconsistent experiences. You can’t have an elegant experience in a mobile app, a decent experience physically in a store, and then a horrible experience in a phone call.

3. Creating consistency across multiple locations is a challenge.

Ishai: At a recent conference in Austin, I got to speak with some of the large multi-unit franchises about some of the struggles that they have. And as you grow and as you continue to expand, controlling a consistent message is something that becomes continuously harder and harder.

4. Voice AI is here to help, but people still have misconceptions about AI’s use within franchises.

Ishai: I think there are three main misconceptions. One, that AI is only for large enterprises or requires you to fully engulf yourself within the technology. Two, that it’s too complex. And three, that it’s too expensive.

Art: With AI, there’s been so much buzz that, to some extent, it’s been overhyped a bit. And the “over-hypeness” leads to intimidation for all of the reasons Ishai shared.

One more thing I would add to this is that there’s a misconception that AI is about replacing humans in jobs.

Discover Best Practices for Successfully Deploying Voice AI

5. Use AI to create labor slack, not labor savings.

Art: From my experience, having implemented marketing AI and voice AI, I leveraged AI to create what I call labor slack versus labor savings. And I call it slack because we didn’t eliminate people doing jobs. We took mundane tasks off of their plate so they can do their jobs better and differently.

6. Get early stakeholder buy-in and align voice AI with your business goals.

Art: As you get more interested in it, [I advise] sharing the idea of leveraging voice AI technology with stakeholders very early on. Get a feel for, “How do my business partners feel about this? How do our frontline employees feel about the concept of voice AI?”

The second thing I would say is align voice AI capabilities with business goals and desired business outcomes. Don’t just do it because you saw a restaurant do it down the block or you’ve heard about it, but make sure that you align it against whatever your business goals are.

7. Start small, test, and then scale your voice AI deployment to meet desired outcomes.

Art: I’m a big believer in following sort of a testing protocol where you prove the concept out and you shake out all the bugs and make sure that the concept works as desired. 

And then you extend that to a pilot where maybe you tackle more use cases or more locations or more cities, and then you scale.

8. Receive and incorporate feedback from employees and customers early and often to increase AI adoption.

Art: Get your employee and your customer feedback early and often because some of this effort is new and you want to take their feedback and factor it in.

If you’re an operator or an owner of a franchisee site, no matter what business it is, we’re in the people business. We have people working for us on the front lines. They’re serving people who are our customers. And people want to be appreciated – they want to offer feedback.

9. Help customers gain confidence in voice AI with helpful resources and ongoing communication.

Ishai: Consumers are used to the traditional IVR. They’re used to being on hold for 10, 15 minutes in some cases. And so what we see initially is more customers saying, “representative,” or, “I want to speak to someone.”

The more we help the end customer understand that this system is actually far more complex – you can ask for recommendations, to place an order, the price of an item – they are far more accepting of it because they can get answers instantly. Read this blog post for guidance on how to gain customer buy-in.

Experience the Benefits of Voice AI for Franchises

10. SoundHound AI’s Smart Answering voice AI solution is accessible, customizable, and quick to onboard.

Ishai: Our consumer-facing solution, Smart Answering, is an incredibly lightweight solution. It really takes, in some cases, less than a month to launch and drive value.

This solution takes critical information that you have on your website as a starting point, and gets us off the ground really quickly. We also allow customers to tailor key components of the conversation that are on brand or specific to their business.

11. Smart Answering handles 100% of phone calls, so employees can focus on in-person customers.

Ishai: What we’re starting to see – truly – is a profound impact across the staff — and across their sanity! Because we have a lot of customers where, before us, the phone was ringing off the hook.

Why Now is the Time for Growing Franchises to Deploy Voice AI

12. Customers expect better experiences, and your competitors are likely already using AI to deliver on this expectation.

Art: The business environment is changing rapidly. We’re seeing channel-blurring across all businesses. And I think businesses need every advantage possible to be able to compete.

At the same time, consumer expectations are changing. We talked about the younger consumer — younger generations put more weight on speed and efficiency in every customer interaction.

And I think AI and, quite frankly, technology helps us personalize experiences with consumers in order to drive business results, but also in order to drive really good experiences. So, the time is now.

Ishai: Your competition is very highly likely looking at this technology right now. Over 95% of franchises plan to adopt AI in a larger way within the next two years. It’s essential for franchises to remain competitive, to remain future-proof, and to continue looking at ways to reduce cost, improve customer satisfaction, and streamline the operations.

The time is now, because the time was yesterday.

Don’t Wait – Try Our Voice AI Today!

At SoundHound AI, we offer a wide range of AI solutions to help businesses of all sizes transform customer service, employee experience, and overall operations.

To try our voice AI for free, click here to build and test your personalized demo of our Smart Answering platform, which allows you to build a custom AI voice assistant that handles 100% of your inbound calls.

Please contact us if you have any questions or would like to learn more about our product offerings.