Fast Food, Long Distance

"And would you like that orange-juice medium or large?" says the voice responding to the lady's drive-thru breakfast order at McDonalds. "Fine, that will be $12.40 in total. Have a wonderful day!" Nothing unusual there, you would think, as the New York Times reports, except that the teenager logging the order was in a call center 150 miles from Los Angeles CA, while the lady driver ordering breakfast on the other end of the squawk-box was in Honolulu.

The next customer our teenage order-taker talks to is in Gulfport, Mississippi. Seconds later, she effortlessly logs a to-go order for a gentleman in Gillette, Wyoming. She and her 35 out-placed call-center co-workers are filling orders for the McDonalds morning shift in a geographic area covering six time zones. They simply tap on-screen buttons to file the requests by Internet with the computer systems of the restaurant concerned. When the order arrives on THEIR screen, local workers carry the food and beverages the necessary few yards to the customer waiting at the collection window. If a restaurant is out of a particular item, a warning appears on the call-center's screens. No-one seems to care that the request for their food may have made a round trip of several thousand miles, though if customers are told what's going on they describe the experience as "weird"

Far from seeking able burger-flippers, new outsourced call centers are looking for skills that have more to do with being fast on the mouse-click.

Why bother? What's wrong with the old squawk-box in the restaurant itself? The case for long-distance, or rather outplaced and centralized order processing, is based on efficiency and cost-saving. First, the new approach allows close monitoring of employees' performance. Second, it helps with a growing problem of in-restaurant workers dividing their attention between too many tasks, such as order-taking, serving, counting out change, and cleaning. Mistakes are often occasioned by a kind of multitasking-induced confusion, which can cause employees to forget details and drop the ball. A third advantage is in multi-lingual order-filling; if the customer wants to order in Spanish or Portuguese, he or she is immediately routed to a bilingual order-taker.

But the biggest gain from remote fast food call-centering seems to be in optimizing time-usage. It might not seem important, but there is typically a 10-15 second gap between one car driving off with its order logged and the next car pulling up at the microphone point. While in Honolulu the lady in the green Toyota is lazily pulling forward to the collection window, the girl in California can be using those seconds to talk to a different customer in Baltimore who has already pulled up. The increased order-count can raise efficiency by an order of magnitude. That's the theory, anyway. The founder of one such call center, Bronco at Santa Maria CA, says it's about saving seconds to make millions One company in North Dakota is already experimenting with order-taking from employees' homes, on specially-installed computer equipment.

The Bronco workforce in California grew from 16 to 125 in six months, and has filled two and a half million fast-food orders in the 18 months since it started. The jury is still out on further expansion, but McDonalds say they are encouraged not only by speed and efficiency benefits, but by the system's ability to improve the customer experience and sell more product. (Other industries are already taking note, such as home-improvement empire The Home Depot, who are thinking of putting speaker systems on their shopping carts so that customer service personnel can help people find their way from Aisle D5 to where the lawn-sprinkler systems are from several hundred miles away).

Back to McDonalds. Flippers? Got enough, thanks. Blippers wanted! Must be demon mousemasters. Once you're on the payroll, they'll test you once in a while to make sure you're still 'wired' fail to click the red box on the computer screen in 1.75 seconds, and you could be thrown out with the uneaten fries. A computer display in the call-center restroom tells employees exactly how long they have been away from their workstation.

But, pressure to perform and meager minimum-wage earnings notwithstanding, there are advantages in working in the call centers rather than the restaurant itself. You can wear whatever clothes you like. You can roll your eyes and make faces at irritating customers they're hundreds of miles away and they'll never know!. AND you don't have to leave work smelling of hamburgers!