Batteries Plus Puts AI Agents on Franchise Sales and Store Phones

The first conversation a prospective Batteries Plus franchisee has about the brand may now be with Savannah, and Savannah is not a person.

The 800-plus-unit franchisor detailed three AI tools in an Oct. 16 Franchise Wire profile, built through a mix of vendor partners, consultants and an in-house research team. Two of them sit at the front door of the business: one for franchise development, one for store phones. The third works behind the counter.

Savannah, developed under Chief Development Officer Joe Malmuth, takes calls from would-be owners, answers questions about the franchise opportunity, then emails a company overview and application link and schedules a discovery call. Malmuth said the effect shows up in the room: “By the time we get on a discovery call now, we're speaking with someone who genuinely understands the Batteries Plus franchise opportunity, changing what our team spends its time on and who ultimately ends up in our system.”

Edison answers calls to stores in English and Spanish, covering hours, directions and service questions, so that no call to a location goes unanswered. “We're capturing business we were previously leaving on the table,” said President Jon Sica. “We see this as a multi-million dollar move.” The company did not publish the figures behind that estimate.

Wattson connects to the point-of-sale system so a new associate can find the right automotive battery without a tenured employee's know-how.

CEO Scott Williams framed the rollout as practical rather than fashionable: “This is not creating AI for the sake of breaking into the world of AI.”

The timing matters because Batteries Plus is selling. The company said it signed 19 franchise agreements and opened 13 locations across six states in the third quarter, the same quarter we covered earlier this month. An agent that pre-qualifies development leads is a capacity decision as much as a technology one.

It fits a pattern. Pokeworks built its own agent and stopped hiring at headquarters, and Hand & Stone pointed AI at recruiting. Batteries Plus sits between build and buy.

The two front-door jobs are ones most franchise systems share, and Revscale, which publishes Revscale Media, approaches them as configurable agents rather than separate builds. Its off-the-shelf Voice Agent answers inbound calls, captures caller details and intent, schedules follow-up and transfers to a person when needed, with every call recorded and transcribed. Its Inbound Agent answers inquiries, asks qualifying questions, scores the lead and routes qualified prospects to the right person. Because the agents are set up in natural language, the same platform can be pointed at development leads or store calls, with the activity flowing into the CRM a system already uses.

What Batteries Plus has not published yet is the scoreboard: how many development calls Savannah handles, how many become discovery calls, and what share of store calls Edison resolves without a person. Those are the first numbers other franchisors will ask for.

Revscale Media is published by Revscale.