Saturday, January 29, 2005
Distributing order takers in time and space
I disgustedly notice that I've had a lot of brands in my blogs lately. But:McDonalds is using voip to distribute order taking out of the restaurant into a call center.
- The move leverages efficiencies in the ordering process, even factoring in the rush-hour delay between one order being completed and the time it takes for the next car to pull up and roll down the window.
"When we had two stores, we had to have two people. At six stores, even at the busiest times, five people could handle it," said Doug King, president of Bronco Communications Inc., who is managing the McDonald's experiment. "At nine stores, the efficiencies get greater and greater. At nine stores, we can manage it with six, assuming a manager is nearby to handle the periodic overflow."
What the hell is a modern day American teenager to do when his/her job, too - is outsourced? What happens when this sort of outsourcing is critical to the day to day functioning basic services like fast food?
- Fast food riot, circa 2020: Multiple riots took place throughout the southern U.S. today when several major fast food restaurant chains suffered an internet outage, disabling order taking and resulted in hour-long delays in the delivery of "fast" food. Available local cooking staff were unable to compensate as none had been trained on the complex order taking functions, and few spoke English. Workers at many of the remaining American institutions, notably the few still working in the legal and garbage collecting professions, were late to work this morning after fighting through angry crowds at the drive thrus.
In other news, deaths due to heart disease and obesity took a small spike downwards today.
