Introduction
The hospitality industry is more of a service industry, thus for an effective operational management, the focus should be on the quality of service that customers receive from the company. When quality and satisfying services are offered, then customers can develop loyalty to certain company, a factor that builds a strong brand name for the company.
In the United States of America, the service industry account for over 80% of the economy’s job market; in hotel and tourism industry, much efforts has been made to improve the service delivery systems in the sector (McCluskey, 2004). The government has some policies meant to protect its population form poor quality form the sector players.
McDonald is the world largest hamburger and fast food restaurants; which operates centrally and franchised business; to remain competitive in the fast developing industry, management should develop a quality service delivery system to all its over 31,000 restaurants in 119 countries.
To manage and control service delivery, the management has to set some benchmarks and see their strict adherence (McDonald Official Website, 2011). This paper discusses service delivery systems in operation management; it will use the case of McDonald to diagnose the issue.
Brief history of McDonald
McDonald is a leading world sandwich provider with more than 31,000 restaurants in 110 countries in the world. Other than itself operating from a central point, it is in the business of franchising; the group restaurant was established in 1940 in San Bernardino, California by a duo by the names Richard and Maurice McDonald. It is known for its fresh quality fast food; the main fast food that the company is known with is sandwiches.
The company offers both counter service and drive-through service depending with the location and the nature of the particular outlet; it has both inside and outside catering however inside catering takes most of the business time. The company aims at improving quality and getting higher returns with the delivery of quality services and fresh foods (McDonald Official Website, 2011)
Literature review
Service in the hospitality industry
In the hospitality industry the ability and willingness to provide quality services is seen as an essential strategy for success and survival; a service can be defined as an encounter between business and a customer that has supporting facility and using facilitated goods.
In McDonald for instance when a customer make an order for a hamburger then the hamburger is the facilitating good, the restaurant I the supporting facility while the people who were involved right from the supply of the material to the service by the waiter form the chain of service (Neal and Quester, 2006).
Any business, in the hospitality industry, has the customer as the most important stakeholder; they aim at creating good cooperation through the service they offer. Customers on the other side are motivated by factors within their psychological core, the consumer environment, and by marketer-controlled activity.
Success in a business is attained when management can understand effectively the expectation of their customers and align their services and duties to satisfy those needs. As the saying goes, “a happy customer tells another while unsatisfied customer tells two others”.
The phrase implies that it is much easy to lose customers than it is to gain them. The leadership of McDonald has been attributed to the quality of service they offer; however, no optimal level of service delivery that can be said to be the best, however, it should be continually be improved (Metters, Kathryn, Madeleine and Steve, 2006). The diagram below shows how different elements of service delivery lead to improved customer service:
From the above diagram, it can be seen that service quality is an element of a number of elements that need to be implemented in an organization. McDonald and its franchisee should ensure that it ha s a flow chart of events that can be followed with the aim of having and end of satisfied customers.
Organizations that offer service responsive to customers’ need perform better than those who do not care or are rigid to change. The hospitality industry is currently under pressure due to high competition and changes in consumers’ preferences. To remain competitive in this market, a company need to ensure it satisfy its customer. Sandwiches are fast foods present in most fast food joints but the choice of one is dependent on the customer. McDonald is an American Sandwich specialist company with its head office in United States of America.
It has been in the business for over 70years thus the company has a pool of human resource that need to have well mastered the trade; at the same time, the company needs to have a service improvement charter for its continued success (McDonald Official Website, 2011)
In the hospitality industry, there is high contact of service providers and the customers, the high interaction need to be strategically managed if it will be maintained. The experience that a customer gets now of service encounter has a wide influence on the attitude, perception and the feeling that he delivers from the institution.
Though McDonald is a fast food restaurant, the internal customer has a large encounter with the external customer either directly or indirectly. Service quality and the experience that customers get form the company should be looked into and improved accordingly (Cook, 2008)
Service quality
The utility that certain individual customers get from certain commodity is the quality of the commodity as long as the customer is concerned. There cannot be a single definition of service quality since it is more of the receivers’ perception that determines whether he will be willing to trade with the company in the future. When concerned on the quality of a service, there are two most important deviations: technical quality and functional quality. Technical quality deals with what is delivered while functional quality is all about how it has been delivered.
Technical quality is tangible while functional technical is not. McDonald management has the role of ensuring that the group of restaurants meets both technical and non-technical quality provisions (Kotler, Bowen and Makens, 2003). The chart below summarizes the service quality phenomenon:
Service Encounter or “Moment of Truth”
Moment of service is the moment that a customer and the service he is receiving interact; it ranges from the general perception that a customer gets with the mention of a certain products or a certain business. McDonald has a strong brand name that offers the customer an appealing feeling; the name has to be protected by offering quality services and provision of goods that meets the demand of a customer.
When a customer is within the premises of the business, the service offered, both tangible and technical should be of a high class that improves the general feeling derived by the customer. This is the way that the organization can strengthen its brand name (Kandampully, 2002),
Service Operations Strategy
When developing a certain effective service operational strategy, McDonald need to undertake an elaborate internal and external audit analysis, the analysis will offer the company with the right approach to improve its services. Three questions needs to be answered genuinely:
- Where the current position as far as service provision is concerned?
- What level of service quality does the company aim at offering?
- What are the expectations of the customers and what level are our competitors offering
With clear answers to the above questions, then the management will be able to develop an effective service delivery system (Blomme, Rheede and Tromp, 2009). The following are the areas that need to be addressed in the system:
Location issues
To reach the target customers effectively, the management should ensure that it is located in areas that target customers can get delivery in the required time and space. McDonald being a fast food needs to be located in areas with high population, and t accessible. For example, in busy streets, airport sites and bus terminals. When offering a franchise, the company should ensure that the franchisee company has a strategic location that can tap the target market effectively.
In the cases, that the restaurant has low flow of customer, the chances that quality and fresh foods are not offered is high. When a restaurant is established, the managers should devise cost leadership, differentiation, and focus the products to the needs of the customer (Hartline, Wooldridge, and Jones, 2003),
Service Strategy
With the restaurants established, then managers should ensure they have a system of how service will be offered, service means that the those people offering the front service, waiters, cashiers, supervisors and manager, and those people offering the tangible products should be sensitive to the needs of a customer.
Consumer preference theory states that for a customer to buy a certain product, the product must be outstanding among the options that the market offers; McDonald products can be said to be services, the services thus need to be outstanding and quality.
To be outstanding, there must be continuous products innovation and an innovation that ensures that products can be differentiated. When a customer is able to differentiate a certain company’s products then the company is able to self-market itself and lead to increased customer satisfaction. Creativity and product innovation comes handy in creating product differentiation.
McDonald is known for its international recognized sandwiches. To ensure that it remain competitive and create a more customer satisfactory goods, the company keeps inventing and improving the quality of sandwiches they serve. A continuous program of training of staffs should be implemented as it will assist the company offer the much need service quality (Grönroos, 2000).
Products differentiation
McDonald aims at offering quality fast foods: the success of the company is dependent on the quality, freshness and reliability of the products. When a company is developing a product, there should be the need that the product is supposed to fulfill.
Fast food joints are places where consumers should get a quick service; this implies that they should have an effective queue flow to ensure that they have ready products adequate for the consumers at a particular point in time and still the products have not stayed in the restaurant for many hours (PIZAM and SHANI, 2009).
Other than the foods being available, the management should ensure that the foods are of the right quality and tastes that they offer is pleasant and offers a memorable experience to the customer; this will increase the utility that the customer will get. The trend that the customers follow at one given point is a change to the product that gives them a higher utility.
When the product is developed, the team should always invest in offering something extra to the consumer. Products come with the idea of packaging, and how the product is presented to the final consumer, there is need to have a pleasant look as the way as the way the product is handled has an effect on its successes (Bebko, 2001).
The role of operation managers in maintaining service delivery system
Operations managers have the role of overseeing service delivery system are effective, they are the ones who make policies that target the improvement of the system. In an outlet of McDonald the operating management can be seen on three levels, outlet manager, daily managers, and supervisors; they should be working as a team to maintain and uphold high service delivery.
When they are enforcing the laid down rules, they should be open for additions and improvement areas of deficiencies, they should from time to time undertake internal and external audit to gauge the success of the outlet.
To implement and maintain high services operation manager should adopt quality management systems like the use of TQM (total quality management system), adoption of Six sigma polices and the use of lean thinking; the spirit of Kaizen (continuous improvements) should be embarked on. With such polices that aim at improving the internal operations for efficiency developed, then the group of hotels will maintain and attain high service delivery.
Of late the hospitality industry is faced with challenges of coping with changes brought about by globalization, people expectations are changing; McDonald operating management teams should be robust in analyzing and developing required intelligence that can assist the company improve on its service delivery.
In foreign outlets, McDonald should develop culture intelligence teams that will assist when making decisions that fit the country of operation. Change in the industry should offer operating managers the drive to research on the best strategy to improve and grow their service delivery.
Recommendation and conclusion
McDonald is doing fairly well in the hospitality industry; however, the service of the chain of restaurants can be improved further to assist in the consolidation of the company’s leadership role. The major challenge facing the company is how to manage the large number of franchisee located in different areas. The management at central level should come up with a service quality charter that looks into technical and functional quality objectives. This will enhance service delivery.
To expand customer base and get their loyalty, the company should look into its service delivery and aim at improving the experience that a customer derives; the “moment of truth” with the customer should offer a memorable experience that can make the customer hunger for more services.
High quality service should look into the products quality, speed of service and the general outlook of the restaurants. McDonald leadership team has the role of pioneering a service improvement strategy; an effective service strategy is strong competitive advantage in the hospitality industry.
References
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