McDonald’s chief customer officer serves up his CX priorities
There are plenty of McDonald’s customers who could say eating at its restaurants has been a recurring memory, starting from their youngest days. In Manu Steijaert’s case, though, much of his life has spent on the other side of the golden arches, helping serve McDonald’s customers.
Speaking on stage at this week’s Collision conference in Toronto, McDonald’s first-ever chief customer officer recalled his childhood in Belgium, where his father opened a McDonald’s in 1978. This was at a time, he noted, when few in Europe were familiar with the brand. Then, between the ages of 14 and 22, he was started working in the restaurant himself, getting a first-hand view of what QSR customers expect.
“The one takeaway that to me is very, very sticky – and which has guided me throughout my whole career – is the fact that we cannot take our customers for granted,” Steijaert told the Collision crowd. “In an industry that is so competitive, where there are so many alternatives, it’s even more true today.”
More and more customer journeys
Steijaert, who reports directly to McDonald’s CEO, took the chief customer officer role after a stint as VP of International Operations, though he started corporately as a field service consultant in 2001. He is now leading a customer experience (CX) strategy for an organization that operates in more than 150 markets, with more than 40,000 restaurants. The complexity facing him, he admitted, is huge.
“If you go back 15 years, there were three options for a McDonald’s customer: you could order at the register and then sit and eat, you could leave, or go through the drive thru,” he said. “That’s three customer journeys, which is still manageable. Now we have the mobile app, delivery, self-order kiosks. There are a lot more customer journeys, and we have to not only design every single one of them but make them personalized with advanced capabilities.”
Perhaps as a result, McDonald’s last fall announced it would be opening Speedee Labs, which will bring teams together at its Chicago headquarters with colleagues from “Hamburger University” and its Innovation Center in Romeoville. Steijaert said this will allow McDonald’s experts in product design, menu design and restaurant design to achieve a greater level of cross-functional collaboration.
“There’s always this risk when you bring it into the corporate headquarters that you kind of kill innovation,” he acknowledged. “(Speedee Labs) will have its own dedicated, very light governance. It has its own framework of thinking about what are actually the most valuable problems for us to solve, including what are the pain points — both for our customers and our restaurant teams.”
Where CX changes at McDonald’s often start
Looking at CX through an employee experience (EX) lens has always informed its strategy, Steijaert said. He gave the example of the company’s self-ordering kiosks, which stemmed from the fact that there wasn’t enough counter space to fit the cash registers needed to serve customers in locations like France.
“Later, when we started talking about it with our customers, they actually started telling us why they enjoyed (the kiosks) and how they thought we could even create more value for them,” he said. “That kicked off a lot of the thinking we have around digital and how digital technologies could impact our business in a very different way.”
Steijaert said one of his challenges is ensuring any CX innovations will scale across McDonald’s vast global footprint. He also keeps in mind the fact that, based on the company’s data, 80 to 90 per cent of those living in its biggest markets visit a McDonald’s on average at least once a year.
On the flip side, operating in multiple geographies allows McDonald’s to experiment and pilot CX improvements. In the U.K., for instance, McDonald’s is trying out delivery kitchens to meet increasing customer demands. In Latin America, the McDonald’s has begun rolling out Dessert Centres.
Perhaps the most significant CX change McDonald’s has recently introduced, however, is a fully automated location in Forth Worth, Texas with no human employees. Steijaert suggested the idea was a way of exploring how to tackle challenges related to density and space constraints, as well as building upon the convenience he said customers have appreciated with mobile ordering and delivery services.
“It’s more of a format size challenge and an effort at getting closer to our customers than it is about, ‘This a model that’s going to be used for the majority of our openings.’ The majority of our openings are going to be traditional restaurants.”
Like pretty much every organization, Steijaert said McDonald’s is also considering how artificial intelligence could transform and improve its CX, but he positioned the technology as more of an area where the company is watching and learning. AI is being used to assess how McDonald’s manages its real estate assets, for instance, but it’s not yet deeply integrated into customer-facing operations.
More important than AI, perhaps, is for Steijaert and his team to shift the culture and mindset of a 68-year-old company that continues to open more than 200 restaurant locations a year.
“We have historically been very focused on process and execution and standardization. We need to move into more agile iteration and innovate close to our customers,” he said. “A lot of our thinking has always been, ‘I have a business problem. Let’s build a solution for that.’ Technology has a role, but the journey and the transformation we’re going to be seeing is one that’s more human-centric, where technology is more of an enabler.”
