When it comes to building up systems support for franchisees, one franchisor dealing in communications technology is investing in the detail required to take the business on to the next level.

The franchised Telcoinabox business, which provides white label telecommunications to be individually branded by franchisees, is planning significant expansion both in Australia and New Zealand, and across the globe. To date it has seen annual growth of $10 million to $14 million since founder Damian Kay began the business in 2002 and has a global turnover close to $80 million a year.

More than 150 service providers offer telephony services including fixed wire, mobile, Toll Free, VoIP (voice over internet provider) and broadband to over 50,000 business and residential customers.

To support the planned development a brand new operations centre has been opened in central Sydney for the Australasian business, the first time the head office has split its support structure. The business development, product and account management functions will remain in the individual country offices in Sydney and Wellington.

Combining the operations of customer service, technical support, operations billing, finance and training is designed to a higher level of service delivery with greater scale and efficiencies for franchisees and wholesale clients.

Kay says "Our aim is to increase the number of service providers we support by 25 percent with minimal increase in head count. To support this growth while achieving greater scale and cost efficiencies we are investing $2 million in streamlining systems and processes over the next two years."

Adding value by adding product is key to the business, and limitless, he says. To this end within a few months a new generation of business grade products will be launched over an 18 month rollout. One of the products is described as a feature-rich hosted voice and data solution as a replacement for traditional PABX systems, allowing customers to have a more flexible option with no capital investment.

The method has been to adopt a best of breed approach, providing the data synchronicity which will make easy access to relevant data through a centralised portal a reality for franchisees. Almost 20 systems will pull together into one business intelligence on the dashboard with a central, single sign-in.

It means franchisees in a mid-market investment will get the benefits normally found in a comparatively larger organisation. Incoming franchisees will be automatically set up in the system, progressively accessing the help and information they require at each stage of business development.

Two business analysts have been working on the technical side to ensure the nuts and bolts are in place to achieve the results required; mirroring them is a usability manager, whose role it is to ensure the hands-on application is intuitive for franchisees.

Ease of business for service providers is the aim, Kay says. "They are the core of our business, so it's essential we ensure our infrastructure and business support systems evolve with them."