They're not cooking up Big Macs in the back room at Elm Square Technologies. But they probably could.
In an old Andover, Massachusetts, textile mill, the company's consultants and software developers have set up a model McDonald's restaurant with a shiny metal counter, an overhead price board, a photo backdrop of a kitchen, and high-tech cash registers.
It's all part of the Elm Square approach pioneered by CEO Tom Jones: See it from the customer's perspective. To solve a thorny technology problem, these engineers didn't hunch in cubicles and bang out code. They donned uniforms and served up McNuggets and fries for two weeks. They took orders during busy lunch hours, felt the stress of making correct change at the drive-through window, and saw Spanish-speaking cooks struggle to read food orders in English.
Then the company's software development division spent two years building a system that overhauls the way a burger giant does business. It was a significant gamble for Elm Square, now four years old, which plunged into the task with the blessing of just one local McDonald's franchise owner, Ken Shapiro, who agreed to test the technology at his North Reading restaurant.
Customer centered
It's the type of customer-centric approach that technology companies will have to embrace to survive in the new Darwinian environment where customers are more scarce and simplicity sells better than intimidating technology.
Elm Square has designed touchscreens with simple graphics and bold colors (to replace ancient machines that had 200 buttons with menu items scrawled in tiny print) networked to kitchen computer screens that can translate orders into Spanish or German. Portuguese is on the way. The new computers require fewer keystrokes for every sale, and they show how to make change, with pictures of dollar bills and coins. A Web system lets Shapiro monitor the store remotely, so he can track sales hour by hour, check staffing and customer waiting time, and communicate with managers. Self-service ordering for customers is just around the corner.
"This was not an easy gig," Shapiro said. "When we first started, I didn't know if this would really happen."
He was willing to give it a shot, mostly because his daughter, then 7, was best friends with Jones' daughter. Shapiro is known by McDonald's executives to be an innovator, willing to take risks to grow his business. And he knew Jones's track record, he said. "I know his ability to make things happen."
Jones, 56, is not fresh out of MIT, although he has taught there as well as at Harvard. He has been interested in the way customers behave since the 1970s, decades before the Internet came into focus and cliches like "CRM," or customer relationship management, were in vogue. At 23, he helped start a company called Epsilon that was a pioneer of the customer database business. It was a concept that only charities grasped in the early years, Jones said, and that wouldn't come into its own until much later.
Virginia Renehan has been working to develop membership at the San Diego Zoo since 1979. In that time, she said, the famous zoo's membership has climbed to 270,000 households from about 40,000. Epsilon built the group's database and was the first to be able to track renewal rates and show how long people were members, which led to tailored direct-marketing letters.
RSS