McDonald’s

Innovate the Experience.

McDonald’s is the world’s largest restaurant chain, serving over 69 million customers daily in over 100 countries across 42,000 locations. Traditionally a leader in the industry, the iconic brand has faced challenges from new competition, including fast-casual restaurants and non-traditional market players like convenience stores, gas stations, and specialty coffee shops — all eroding its market share. Sales had experienced a prolonged slump with high customer churn, with once-loyal customers seeking alternatives.

McDonald’s had to reinvent itself to remain relevant and meet changing customer behaviors and expectations head-on. They engaged THRIVE to help understand the current state customer journey, uncover disruptive customer insights, define a global point of view to guide their Experience of the Future (EOTF) transformation, and identify new opportunities for ongoing innovation in its customer experience.

Get to Know People, Not Just Markets.

McDonald’s recognized that to stay relevant to the people who matter most — its customers — it needed to create personalized customer experiences rooted in their motivations and passions. The company was entrenched in a traditional operational mindset, prioritizing the broadcasting of its offerings over a genuine understanding of customer needs.

McDonald’s partnered with THRIVE to elevate the customer experience and transform its experience strategy. They set out to engage deeply with their guests in the context of their daily lives to uncover what drives them and how their priorities are shifting. This commitment to understanding and connecting with customers as multi-dimensional individuals was essential for McDonald’s to evolve and lead the industry again.

Experience Life Where and When It Happens.

People are more than just a collection of demographics, consumption patterns, and customer profiles; they’re humans first, with all their complexities, quirks, routines, and rituals. THRIVE helped McDonald’s view the world through the eyes of its guests, generating deep customer insight into the McDonald’s experience across all its stages and touchpoints: pre-visit, during the visit, and post-visit. This helped McDonald’s understand their motivations and needs on a functional and emotional level.

THRIVE’s researchers used a mixed-methods research approach to understand customer sentiment and collect consumer insights. We combined observation, shadowing, and in-depth interviews to gain a rich contextual understanding of the customer journey. We explored their worlds open-endedly, from planning their visits to dining with families, riding with hardened drive-thru road warriors, and engaging with McDonald’s crew to understand their routines and repertoires.

THRIVE’s researchers used a mixed-methods research approach to understand customer sentiment and collect consumer insights. We combined observation, shadowing, and in-depth interviews to gain a rich contextual understanding of the customer journey. We explored their worlds open-endedly, from planning their visits to dining with families, riding with hardened drive-thru road warriors, and engaging with McDonald’s crew to understand their routines and repertoires.

Translate Data into Actionable Strategy.

We approached the data analysis process holistically, combining creative and analytical thinking to develop a comprehensive view of the customer experience. With hours of video footage and hundreds of photographs, we coded and organized our observations and responses to make all the data sources manageable and accessible. Analyzing the data this way allowed us to identify patterns, pain points, market trends, themes, and gaps, ultimately creating actionable insight statements based on customer narratives.

Armed with these valuable customer insights, the THRIVE team began mapping the various experience flows. We documented the customers’ emotional journey, starting with their decision to eat at McDonald’s and continuing through their first impressions, discovery, usage, and, finally, their memories after their visit. We developed four customer journey maps, one for each region, consisting of the customer’s emotional journey, pain points, needs, and a set of customer experience principles for new product and service development.

Focus on What Matters Most.

Our time with McDonald’s customers illuminated the human story, their everyday challenges, and how those influenced their behaviors and choices. With a comprehensive understanding of customer problems, needs, and desires throughout their dining journey, we needed to address a critical question: Where should we concentrate our efforts, and which of the identified problems significantly impact McDonald’s customers most?

It was essential for our decision-making to understand which pain points were the most dissatisfying and commonly regarded as “high priority”—the most relevant to customers yet least addressed by the brand.

To equip McDonald’s executives with the quantitative data they required to make the strategic and financial decisions that would confidently propel the strategy forward and meet their business goals, we validated our customer insights and experience flows to identify and prioritize high-impact pain points, underserved needs, and key problems to solve across the end-to-end experience. This quantitative data pinpointed the insights that resonated with each customer segment, providing a strategic path forward for ongoing innovation and new product development.

Define a Global Point of View.

Based on this customer data, the THRIVE team developed a global perspective that considered the impact of our findings on people and places around the world. Together, we crafted a comprehensive customer experience strategy based on a set of global customer experience principles. The strategy gives McDonald’s the freedom and flexibility to accommodate how different cultures want to receive the change across different operating markets and a range of franchisee permutations.

We informed the ideal brand expression for the EOTF in-restaurant and drive-thru experience and generated a wealth of short-, medium-, and long-term customer experience opportunities, ranging from evolutionary improvements to revolutionary step changes.

Activate Customer Insights, Strategy, and People.

The real work of any customer experience initiative doesn’t stop at capturing customer insights and developing principles and recommendations; it’s about implementing them to drive meaningful change within the organization.

To help McDonald’s achieve alignment and clarity on EOTF’s customer-centricity, we ran strategic alignment and activation workshops across business functions with over 250 stakeholders in four regions (France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada) to educate and empower employees. These workshops were tailored to each business function’s specific need, highlighting the critical customer insights with actionable steps for implementation and demonstrating how EOTF aligned with each region and department’s strategic plan. At the core of our socialization approach was connecting employees with their target audiences to foster a more profound empathy for a guest’s needs. This presented an outside-in point of view, empowering employees to make a real impact and make the change real.

The Future Made Real.

Our work established a single source of truth for the ideal customer experience and identified a path forward for the brand to stand out against its competitors. Prioritizing and focusing the organization on investing in the right customer touchpoints that generate value from customer service to food quality to digital differentiation aided decision-making and informed decisions. As a result, a sales boost of 4 to 6 percent was observed in the 2,000 U.S. locations revamped under EOTF in 2018. Following these improvements, McDonald’s has furthered its transformation by updating every U.S. restaurant and has reported its largest comparable sales increase in ten years.