Recently, McDonald revealed that their social media strategy was to create 14,500 Facebook pages by the end of the year. Each McDonald store will have their own Facebook page where customers can post their dissatisfaction or operational issues. Through this strategy, local stores will be able to address issues more quickly and efficiently.
McDonald
Even though this strategy will require a large investment in staffing, I strongly believe that McDonald will gain more customers after the strategy is implemented. This strategy will show that the company is willing to improve their services and products to maximize customer satisfaction. By letting customers express their dissatisfaction through one-to-one dialogues, it will create an illusion that the next time they visit McDonald the same issue would not appear again. Therefore, through this strategy, customers who have had unhappy encounters with McDonald would more likely eat at McDonald again rather than go to another fast food restaurant.
In my opinion, gaining back dissatisfied customers will be extremely beneficial for McDonald. Two years ago, McDonald invested in a paid-for tweet with hash tag #McDStories to promote the quality of its products. This campaign was closed down after 2 hours due to all the negative publicity it had attracted. Many past customers were posting their dissatisfaction with their service/product and some were even including hash tags such as #McFail. Through this failed campaign, one can conclude that McDonald has lost many customers due to rare mistakes that employees have made. McDonald’s profit would increase greatly, due to increase in sales, if they manage to gain back all the dissatisfied customers with the Facebook pages strategy.
Sources:
http://www.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-twitter-campaign-goes-horribly-wrong-mcdstories-2012-1