McDonald’s Gives People What They Want

The McDonald's Corporation is one of the largest fast food retailers across the globe. It has been

a well-known and valuable brand for over half a century. The company’s mission and vision is

striving to be the world’s best quick service restaurant and formalizing its beliefs into “People

Vision and People Promise.” The company’s motto is “Quality, Service, Cleanliness and Value”.

Experts report that McDonald’s serve nearly 60 million customers every day, and has around

30,000 restaurants and franchises in more than 100 countries. It is an incredibly successful brand,

and its logos and slogans are recognized across the world. The company focuses on marketing

strategies that effectively attract a wide variety of people. They especially appeal to children in

hopes that they will become lifelong customers.

Moreover, McDonald’s has taken up the banner of transparency with its nutrition and sourcing

information, and has introduced environmental stewardship initiatives into its supply chain.

Basically, consumers want answers to basic questions about their food such as:

What’s in your Chicken McNuggets? Why should I eat anything that has ingredients like

“dimethylpolysiloxn” embedded into it?

So, in August 2012, McDonald’s Canada gave customers the floor, and set up a public question-

and-answer forum on its website. Canadian consumers simply go onto the website and post a

question about food currently on the Canadian menu. Within a few days, McDonald’s should

respond. Sometimes the response is a brief statement while other times it may be a video. By

having their questions answered, customers can feel more comfortable with McDonald’s as a

food option. Similarly, McDonald’s Australia rolled out a smartphone application

called “TrackMyMacca’s” that traces ingredients from menu items back to their source.

McDonald's maintains a consistent customer relationship management (CRM) throughout its

restaurants by using a method which provides improved data capture, real-time reporting, and

fast complaints resolution. This uniformity is down to the utilization of a program called

“PowerCentre” that is supplied by Astute Solutions. The software provides a data capture and

information database which can be used to monitor and measure the customer relationship
throughout the brand. The “PowerCentre” software brings in data from throughout the company

and includes both positive and negative feedbacks. Being able to assess restaurants by region, or

even individual restaurants, means that McDonald's can quickly spot potential customer

relationship complaint and resolve them before they become a serious problem. Information is

passed through the company quickly, providing key results.

There are several reasons why “Astute Solutions” were chosen to be the providers of

McDonald’s CRM services. Firstly, McDonald's started looking for a CRM service provider with

a concrete set of goals. They wished to extend the capacity for data capture from customers and

have software which could provide both McDonald's corporate services and individual franchises

with access to real-time customer information. They also wanted to be able to integrate their

existing database into an effective CRM tool without the software becoming bloated or

manageable. In addition, they also wanted software which was flexible and functional to provide

support for their evolving needs as a business.