Even a McJob isn't safe from
BPO anymore. Given the fast food industry's obsession with the bottom-line and efficiency, this isn't really too surprising. For a detailed look into the industry, read Eric Schlosser's
"Fast Food Nation" and you'll understand what matters most in this business (Hint: It's not the employees...)
From today's wsj.com "Real Time" column..
BACK TO THE GRILL: Last week, McDonald's said it is testing a drive-thru system in which the food order is routed to a call center and then back to the restaurant, an effort to cut down on errors. "If you're in L.A. and you hear in a year or so a Spanish-speaking individual taking your order with a North Dakota accent, you'll know what we're up to!" noted a McDonald's executive, according to the Thomson StreetEvents transcript.
This, of course, is another one of the little miracles made possible by cheap telecom costs. But aside from addressing one of the great frustrations of modern life – I said NO special sauce … and where is my breakfast burrito?!! -- the McDonald's test is a bold new wrinkle to business-process outsourcing: Even if people are transacting nearly face-to-face, it may still be preferable to route the transaction through a third party hundreds of miles away, or ultimately overseas.
Quality of the call experience, rather than cost, becomes the driving factor – because the only way it makes sense is if the third party does a much better job handling the order than the person in the store – and the staff could handle multiple stores in multiple time zones to help juggle volume, and be multilingual to boot. And with the Internet still a fairly lousy way to order takeout in a hurry, we could see all sorts of food orders being outsourced to overcome language or transcription errors – pizza, Chinese, you name it. That's a pretty modest vision, we know – but throw in outsourced, GPS-enabled cab-driver directions and you start to see its power.
