The really bad news at McDonald’s…
You’ve heard that McDonalds is planning to outsource their drive-through-window communications to a call-center in North Dakota, but have you thought about the terrible news behind that item?
Call center professionals with “very strong communication skills” could help boost order accuracy and ultimately speed up the time it takes customers to get in and out of the drive-thrus, the company said.
“You have a professional order taker with strong communications skills whose job is to do nothing but take down orders,” said Matthew Paull, McDonald’s chief financial officer.
Let me see if I understand this correctly. McDonald’s employees’ communication skills are so poor they’re experimenting with a call-center to handle lunch orders?
Ouch. McDonald’s should sue our public school system.
Here are the numbers: about five percent of orders have errors, and it’s seriously cutting into their business as customers are understandably upset. The call-center charges the franchise 28 cents for – and shaves about five seconds from – each transaction.
Back in the Stone Age, I worked drive-thru at Burger King.
1. Mistakes happen. Mistakes in order-taking will happen with the best trained, most erudite, and good-communicating order-taker available, whether it’s local or remote.
2. A goodly percentage of mistakes happen because of the person in the car—because they don’t know what they want, because they change their mind by the time they get to the window (admitting it or not), because they don’t understand that a “hamburger” is different from a “Whopper,” because they don’t understand drink (or fries) sizes, or because they can’t speak clearly themselves. Outsourcing the order taker won’t do anything for this.
3. It sounds, though, like this will be a great excuse for the drivers and window folks to be able to blame a third party (“those damned order-takers in North Dakota/Mumbai”) for any mess-ups.
Feh.
I strongly suspect that this will improve order accuracy. At every fast-food place I go to, the people taking orders are also in some way preparing food. That’s very distracting, and the call-center will solve that problem.
Dave:
If the customer doesn’t understand sizes, or differences in menu items, then doesn’t Mickey D have a bigger problem? Like BASIC COMMUNICATION on the menu board?
I refuse to go to there any more (except for maybe a Coke, but I’m eschewing most caffeine, so that’s not a much of a probability) because of constant screw-ups, cold food and totally lackadasical attitude. If I were a franchise owner I would hang my head in shame. If I didn’t even KNOW about these problems, I’d deserve to lose my shirt.
Wee Daram
Is that picture from the Normal McDonald’s?
I wonder what happens when the network goes down? No order for you today!
Yep. Taken from my favorite coffee shop next door.
And what are you talking about?
The network will never go dow