McDonald Service Analysis-Free-Samples for Students-Myassignment

Question: Discuss about the McDonald Service Anaysis. Answer: McDonald service analysis McDonald is a known brand in different parts of the world. The company operates in the QSR (Quick Service Restaurant) industry and it has number of outlets in Australia. McDonald has to ensure that its customers get the same experience across any of the stores. The organization ensures this thing through product and service standardization. Over the time, the management of McDonald has realized that it is easy to do product standardization. However, it is difficult to do service standardization. The management has to focus on various front stages and back stages operation for service standardization (Harris, 2009). The overall customer experience would depend on the way McDonald can manage its internal and external operations. It is imperative for McDonald to have standardized back stage and front stage operations across its stores. For example, the company cannot afford to have different front stage process in Sydney stores and Melbourne stores. It would result in a bad customer exp erience. The flowchart of the back-stage operations of McDonald can be shown as: Flowchart: Back Stage operations of McDonald The front operations of McDonald are more people dependent. Therefore, it is important that the company must invest on the training of people. The flowchart of the front-end operations of McDonald restaurant can be shown as: Flowchart: Front Stage operations of McDonald Significance of Service Encounter The above diagram shows the front stage operations of McDonald are complex in nature. There is a dependency on number of people encounter. Therefore, it would be correct to say that the service encounter is the key for McDonald to ensure service standardization. The definition of a service encounter is broad and includes a customer's interaction with customer-contact employees, machines, automated systems, physical facilities, and any other service provider visible element (Helgesen, 2008). It would be correct to say that the absolute customer satisfaction would come only when McDonald is able to improve the service encounter between its employees and its customers. In turn, the service encounter can be improved only when the touch points are improved. The above diagram shows that there are multiple touch points of service encounter for McDonald. The organization must take measures to improve the service encounter with consumers. The key steps of methods that McDonald can take to imp rove the service encounter can be listed as: Invest on training and development of people: Helgesen (2008) argued that the quality or customer experience in service industry depends a lot on the type of people that organizations can get. The organizations can ensure the service quality through adequate training and development programs. It is recommended that that McDonald should have a allotted budget for its training and development programs across Australia. Kwortnik (2009) suggested that generally organizations should have 1% to 2% of revenue as their training budget. The training and development plan should be developed and implement for employees and staff at different levels. With respect to McDonald, the training should be developed for senior management, mid level management and wait staff. Process standardization: Lusch (2008) argued that organizations could improve service encounter through process standardization. McDonald has taken various steps to improve process standardization. For example, organizations uses a full fledge ERP system so that its processes are standardized. Various processes of the organization like vendor management, procurement, and inventory management are interlinked through ERP system. Benchmarking: It is important to mention that benchmarking is also an important tool that could be used to improve the service encounter. Kwortnik (2009) suggests that the approach of benchmarking is particularly useful when the organizations want to adopt the best in industry fundamentals. With this approach, McDonald can learn from the service delivery mechanism of other players in the industry. Taking feedback into consideration: Lusch (2008) highlighted that customer feedback is one of the most effective method to improve service encounter. As a part of feedback process, McDonald should try to understand the pain point of customers. The strategy to tackle the service encounter should depend on the pain point of customers. The entire idea of improvement in service encounter is that the management of McDonald should understand that its employees are the first line of customers. The wait staff may appear as a low level employee. However, he or she is the one who eventually deals with employees. Therefore, it is imperative that McDonald should have a common code of conduct that should be used to manage its different stores. Managerial Implications I personally believe that organizations in service sector must focus to improve the service quality. There could be serious managerial implications if the service quality is not up to mark. It is important that the management of McDonald must keep continuous watch over its service offerings. The first thing for McDonald would be to plan a budget for its service improvement plans. It is recommended that the management should develop a group or formulate a committee that would initially assess the current quality of service offerings from McDonald. The management can use the Service Gap model. The gap model (also known as the "5 gaps model") of service quality is an important customer-satisfaction framework (Lancastre, 2008). It is important that the management should have a close watch over all the five gaps. The supply chain analysis of McDonald suggests that the company has a vast eco-system. The suppliers of McDonald are spread across Australia and in fact across the globe. Therefo re, any compromise in any of the service gap can affect the operations of McDonald badly (Voima, 2013). If any of these gaps do not support the organizations strategy and purpose, it needs to be addressed. The knowledge of the service encounter has some important implications for managers. It is important that the managers of McDonald should realize the importance of service encounters and the impact of service encounters on customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. It is recommended that the management of McDonald should take a top-down approach to inculcate the knowledge to mid level management. The senior leadership can arrange various learning sessions where the seniors can pass on the importance and criticality of service encounters to executives. It is important that the focus on service quality should be established as a culture within the organization. Employees at different levels should equally practice the culture. Another option for McDonald is to take the services of external consultants to provide training to employees. In this era of Internet, McDonald can also utilize the power of social media. The management can have online training modules. In fact, there should be training plans that can be made mandatory for employees (Bechkoff, 2009). The bottom line is that all the executives of McDonald should have a 360-degree view of the service encounters and service relationship marketing. The long term planning of service relationship marketing would help McDonald to improve its relationship with customers and in long term it would help McDonald to improve customer retention (Preston, 2013). The customers should be treated as advocate of McDonald so that customer can also market the offerings of the company. References Baron, S., Harris, K., Hilton, T. (2009).Services marketing: text and cases. Palgrave Macmillan. Broady-Preston, J. (2013). Changing Marketing Concepts: Contemporary Theories and Paradigms in Services Marketing.Marketing Library and Information Services II: A Global Outlook,159, 23. Gronroos, C., Voima, P. (2013). Critical service logic: making sense of value creation and co-creation.Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science,41(2), 133-150. Helgesen, O. (2008). Marketing for higher education: A relationship marketing approach.Journal of Marketing for Higher Education,18(1), 50-78. Kwortnik, R. J., Thompson, G. M. (2009). Unifying service marketing and operations with service experience management.Journal of Service Research,11(4), 389-406. Lages, L. F., Lancastre, A., Lages, C. (2008). The B2B-RELPERF scale and scorecard: Bringing relationship marketing theory into business-to-business practice.Industrial Marketing Management,37(6), 686-697. Palmatier, R. W., Jarvis, C. B., Bechkoff, J. R., Kardes, F. R. (2009). The role of customer gratitude in relationship marketing.Journal of marketing,73(5), 1-18. Vargo, S. L., Lusch, R. F. (2008). From goods to service (s): Divergences and convergences of logics.Industrial Marketing Management,37(3), 254-259.