McDonald’s Admits Service Quality Has Dropped In The US

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McDonald’s Corporation (NYSE:MCD) is the world’s largest fast food restaurant chain. The “Golden Arches” have long been a symbol of family friendly atmosphere and tasty burgers and fries. However, the icon of fast food has quickly begun to slip in customer satisfaction in the last few years.

Perhaps the most embarrassing instance of proof that customers, especially in the U.S., are not satisfied with the service offered was the failed advertising campaign the store posted on Twitter. McDonald’s attempted to utilize the clickable hashtag feature on Twitter to create a viral advertising campaign. Under the #McDStories hashtag, the company offered Twitter users the chance to learn more about the restaurant’s employees.

However, the plan backfired royally when instead McDonald’s customers began posting their horror stories involving the restaurant and the service they received. The campaign did indeed go viral, and became so bad that McDonald’s suffered from the publicity of it. Now, with that a bad memory, the restaurant has finally begun to admit changes are necessary.

McDonald’s Product Launches Too Fast

McDonald’s USA president, Jeff Stratton, told investors on Thursday that the company tried to force the launch of too many new products this past year. He said, “The pace of product introduction in my opinion: too fast.”

This year, between March and July, McDonald’s added Premium McWraps, Egg White Delight McMuffins, blueberry-pomegranate smoothies, and new Quarter Pounders to the U.S. menu. According to Stratton, this extremely rapid rollout “created challenges for the restaurants.” He claims that this is what caused the service to be slow.

He said, “In retrospect, I would have taken more time on that.”

Kevin Newell, McDonald’s chief U.S. brand and strategy executive told investors that the company needed to “be smarter about how we roll new products out.”

Repairing The Damage

Now that McDonald’s has issued an apology for its lack of service, investors want to know how the company will clean up its mess. According to the WSJ, the company will be reducing the amount of money spent on remodeling stores in the U.S. and focus instead on features that will speed up the preparation process. These features will include new food prep tables that can hold more ingredients, which allows employees to make orders more quickly. This will also help with making customized orders more rapidly as well.

Stratton said that the company is going to make its training for crew members more rigorous and informative, to ensure they truly understand what they’re doing. He announced the company will also be rolling out a brand new customer feedback system for all 14,000 locations in the U.S. This new system will send customer complaints directly to the restaurant so that the issue can be resolved much more rapidly.

Where’s The Beef?

So, McDonald’s has issued an apology for the lack of customer service in their fast food restaurants. Hopefully the next step they take will be to add more meat to their menu items. I can remember when you had to have two hands to hold a Big Mac and there was no way you were going to eat it without dripping secret sauce on your shirt. Now, you have to request that the employees put ketchup in your to go order. Fries require ketchup… end of story.

Disclosure: Author represents that he has no position in any stocks mentioned in this article at the time this article was submitted.