Question

1. McKen restaurant is experiencing sales decline this year. The manager is worried about the sustainability of the restaurant. He asked you to form a team to investigate the causes of the sales decline. After identifying the management dilemma, you discuss the management question with your manager.

1. What type of management question should you set?
2. You found one internal report about customers’ complaint records in 2018 by the customer service department, however, your manager asked you to check “recentness”, “authority” and “compatibility” of the records. Comment on these three areas of the records.

Answer 1

In the given situation, McKen restaurant is experience in the current year and is facing questions on the sustainability of the business. As the person responsible for the investigation on drop of sales,I would like to answer the questions as follows

a. A key question for the management should be to find the root causes of sales decline including customer experience, quality and taste of food, hygiene at the restaurant, responsiveness and bhaviour of staff, lack of online ordering and delivery mechanism etc.,

b. Recentness of the records: Customer complaint registers and feedback are to be obtained and evaluated to continuosly improve on the service delivery.Restaurant should explore obtaining customer feedback though online surveys, polls etc.,

Authority in the records: Authority of the records generally refers to the completeness of the customer complaint registers and other documentation. This helps the management to know that the feedback obtained has been genuine and the feedback can be addressed accordingly. This helps us in identifying the aggrieved customer by his details like name, contact number, date of restaurant visit etc.,

Compatability of the records often describes the format of collection of feedbacks and complaints and its ability to integrate to the existing systems in the restaurant. Compatability is crtical for the user to enable collation of data across platforms. For example, a manual paper based entries may not be compatible with online feedback applications and vice versa.

Analysisng these three aspects is critical to evaluate the accuracy and quickly respond to the negative feedback from the customer and thereby increasing customer experience.