Question

Read the following case and answer the questions below.

McDonald’s

When a customer drives up to the speaker box at some McDonald’s drive-throughs, their order is placed with an employee located in a distant call center. The order, along with a photograph taken to the match the customer with the order, is then instantly displayed on a video screen in the food preparation area of the restaurant where the order is placed.

Brainerd, Michigan – Ellie Feld pulled into the drive-through lane at McDonald’s the other day, craving a double cheeseburger. As she leaned out of the window of her Chevy Blazer to place her order through a speaker box, Feld was greeted by the friendly voice of an order taker she thought was working inside. Not even close. Four states away in a Colorado Springs, CO call center, “Linda” recorded Feld’s order and flashed it onto a computer screen inside the kitchen of the Brainerd McDonald’s. Less than 2 minutes later, Feld drove away, a smile on her face and a burger in hand.

In these McDonald’s test sites, the drive-through turnaround time improved by 20 seconds and orders contained fewer mistakes. “In most McDonald’s you’ve got someone to take the order, make the change, and go get the food – you’ve got somebody doing three things,” said Glenn Cook, owner of Brainerd McDonald’s. “Here, someone is sitting at the call center and they have nothing else to do. They are not multi-tasking.”

Question-1 (60 pts)

As a service company, McDonald’s includes their customers in the production process. How do customers participate? What aspects of their production process are tradable? How does customer involvement limit the tradability of inputs and finished goods? Limit your response to 300 words.

Question-2 (40 pts)

Why has McDonald’s opted to utilize call centers for order taking? Limit your response to 200 words.

Answer 1

Q1:Customers can be particpated in the service planning, designing, testing and execution level. Customer being the prime focus of any service industry there feedback suggestions needs to be incorporated properly to get the desire output of satisfaction. Thus in this case McDonalds effectively utilise customers during their design and trial of implementation of new systems and proposed operational practices. This helped them to reduce the turn around time, increase the productivity of employees and enhance the level of co ordination.

Customer involvement sometimes limits the trdability due to lack of proper alignment and changing demand and expectation, delay in order decisions etc.

Q2: They believe in better co ordination from various teams so that a dedicated team can manage the orders ( centralised order processing). This helps in reducing the cost involved in order placement and also enhance the communication capability ( real time reporting to the aligned store). This also helps in managing the order placement much better and can address the concerns through collective feedback and response collection.