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Don't try this at home

June 28, 2011 by Janet Eden-Harris — CMO & SVP Strategy, Market Force

Last week I had the pleasure of hosting Jerry Calabrese for a Fast Casual webinar. For those that missed it, Jerry recently retired from McDonald’s where he was the Global VP for Customer Measurement Programs. Translation? He built and ran the system that McDonald’s still uses to track how well they’re serving their customers. Here’s what’s so interesting - as great as McDonald’s is doing right now, it wasn’t always this rosy. In fact, in 2000, the company had really slipped. They were struggling to grow comp sales, their product line was tired, the press was all negative and morale was way down. Their stock was at an all-time low of $12 per share. Jim Skinner, McDonald’s CEO, stepped in and laid down a plan to get the company back to a focus on the customer. One key pillar of that strategy was the Customer Measurement program that Jerry built. They made mystery shopping a central tenant of their measurement, along with customer satisfaction, their internal audits, employee engagement scores, and of course, financial performance of each store. What was novel was how they used technology to pull it all together into a single view and tied results directly to how EVERYONE was compensated -- from Jim Skinner on down to the restaurant manager. And what a turnaround! Today, McDonald’s has raced past much of the competition. They’re delivering a consistent experience to their customers. Those customers are coming back. And so has the company’s growth, financial performance, and share price. Today? It’s north of $82 a share.

That success story is inspirational. But one thing Jerry took time to note was the fact that he had to build this system from scratch because there wasn’t anything out there he could leverage. Today, companies have more choice. He says, “Don’t build this yourself. Go with a partner like Market Force who has a system you can leverage to pull all this data in and get a single view of the customer. So you can spend your time focusing on fixing problems, not finding them.”

If you haven’t already, check out the Fast Casual article here, and the webinar here.