Discussion about the Service Description for McDonald

Question: Discuss about the Service Description for McDonald. Answer: Introduction: McDonald is a global company that operates its restaurants across the world. The company is into service industry and the customer satisfaction matters a lot in this industry. The competition is high in this industry and it is important that the organizations must focus on cost optimization. McDonald has to manage a lot of process at back-end and front-end to create an excellent customer experience (Harris, 2009). The objective of the organization is to have optimized processes in place. The flowchart of the back-stage operations of McDonald can be shown as: The flowchart of the front-end operations of McDonald restaurant can be shown as: For service organizations like McDonald, the interaction between front line personnel and the customer is crucial as they aim to create high quality service encounters. The service encounter has a significant impact on the overall customer satisfaction (Helgesen, 2008). The above flow chart of front operations show that there are various touches points of interaction. The customer executives of McDonald have to ensure that they provide the unique customer experience at each of the touch point. The overall customer satisfaction could be improved only when the service encountered is effective. There are various methods that McDonald can use to improve the service encounter. It is important that the organization should take a standardization approach to provide a standard experience to customers. From customer perspective, it is important that they should get a similar experience across different McDonald restaurants. It can happen only when McDonald invest in the training and develo pment programs of its executives (Kwortnik, 2009). The executives like managers, wait staff and other employees should understand the meaning of standardization that could be a platform for highly effective customer service. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the customer satisfaction levels or the customer satisfaction of customers depends a lot on the interaction of employees and customers. Therefore, it is recommended that the management of McDonald should consider its employees as first line of customers. This approach would help the company to improve the service encounter of customers with employees of the company. The service encounter of employees with customers would also enable the management of McDonald to understand the pain points of customers. It is believed that the feedback form customers also enable the organization to improve the service encounters (Lusch, 2008). The feedback from customers would enable McDonald to improve the service quality. I believe that it is important that the service encounters should be in line with the organizational structure of McDonald. The most significant characteristic of an organization is probably its structure (Lancastre, 2008). Organizational structure transitions from informal to formal to teamwork oriented, as the organization travels through the life cycle. Organizational structure dictates whether the organization is defined as mechanistic or organic, which then determines how open or closed the organization is to innovation and change and the service encounters. When diagnosing deficient organization structures, the internal design components that need to be considered at the organizational level include, technology, the organizations strategy, human resources systems, and culture and measurement systems. Each of these elements needs to align with the others and with the external environment for an organization to be effective (Voima, 2013). If any of these components do not support the organizations strategy and purpose, it needs to be addressed. Without financial performance and stakeholder satisfaction, the organization will decline and will not survive. 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. The most significant characteristic of an organization during the organizational life cycle is formalization. As organizations become more prominent in the market, leaders do not have a choice but to formalize operations to maintain some semblance of order within the process of growth. The most significant characteristic of a service based organization like McDonald during the organizational life cycle is innovation. Daft (2015) recognizes that one of the greatest attributes of a service-based organization is that it has a flat structure and encourages innovation. As he further states, big companies have a hard time supporting innovation for the future (p.371; Daft, 2015). One of the great leaders of the twentieth century , Jack Welch (retired CEO of GE), even transformed General Electric through his approach to modify the big company problem of stifled innovation, when he manifested the tactic to transform a giant into a big-company, small-company hybrid (p.349; Daft, 2015). When organizations reach the third stage of the life cycle process, formalization, innovation becomes difficult and needs addressing. Without innovation, organizations begin the decline in the life cycle process. Similar to the human life; when you stop growing (mentally, physically, etc.) you start the decline to death. Daft (2015), notes that companies often experience this decline around the 10-year mark and begin replacing top management in search of revitalization. Innovative approaches in marketing, technology, and even customer base must be evaluated. One of the most important implications for managers is in terms of understanding the concept of service marketing (Bechkoff, 2009). The knowledge and the experience of dealing with the customers during the service encounters would enable the managers of McDonald to have a deep understanding of 7Ps of service marketing and customer relationship marketing. In addition to the traditional 4Ps of marketing (Product, Price, Place and Promotion) the service marketing Ps also include People, Physical Evidence and People. It is important that the managers of McDonald should have a 360-degree view of the service marketing concepts (Preston, 2013). The managers should take its customers as its partners that would enable the organization to increase its business. I have learned that the managers of McDonald should realize that they need to work on front-end operations as well as back end operations. The front-end operations are associated with the interaction with customers and the back-end operations are associated with the employees and internal stakeholders of McDonald. The management of McDonald should focus on continuous optimization of processes that are part of the front end and back end system. Another implications for the managers of McDonald is the use of benchmarking. The managers can use the benchmarking tool to benchmark its service operations against the service operations of other restaurants in the industry. The knowledge of customer service and service encounters would also help the management of McDonald to understand the core customer values and the augmented customer values. McDonald operates in the service environment and it is important that the augmented product matters more than the actual product or the core product. I believe that there is always a scope of improvement for service-based companies to improve their service. McDonald can learn a lot from the service encounter experiences of its employees with customers. 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. Daft, R. L. (2015). Organization theory and design (12th ed.) Mason, OH: South-Western, Cengage Learning. Retrieved from: https://gcumedia.com/digital-resources/cengage/2015/organization-theory-and-design_ebook_12e.php Gronroos, C., Voima, P. (2013). 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