Analysis And Recommendations For Improving Happy Meal Restaurant Service In Australia - Essay.

Objectives of the Business Report

Question:

Discuss about the Improving the Service Operations of the Restaurant.

The purpose of this report of this business report is to conduct a survey with the consumers and staffs of the Happy Meal restaurant in Australia in order to have a detailed insight about their operations and quality of service. The report also aims to recommend suitable approaches in order to overcome their gaps in service.

While investigation the nature and the quality of service of Happy Meal restaurant, it was necessary to take into consideration the nature of food offered by the Happy Meals, their main target customers, their price-bracket and managerial traits existing in the system.

The survey was conducted via designing open ended question targeting the customers who visited the restaurants during the pick business hours. The survey also includes kitchen and waiting staffs who are working with Happy Meals for at least 5 years.

• Survey only target the customers at the pick time
• Survey could not access majority of the kitchen staffs as they were busy during pick time
• The survey might include bias approach from both customers and staffs.

It was assumed that customers who visited during the pick hours are best to comment on the quality and service of a restaurant as it is during pick hours that the gaps in the service and gets highlighted (Mok, Sparks & Kadampully, 2013).

Happy Meal is a fast food restaurant in Australia that specialises in food and beverages. They are mostly popular for their snacks. Whitehaven city council has their 30% of share with Happy Meal.

• The menu of the restaurant has not changed in the last 5 years
• The kitchen of the restaurant is messy and a little bit dirty
• The waiting staffs do not have proper uniform. Moreover, some of them do not even wear hair covers during duty hours
• The internal decor and furniture is out dated and unappealing
• It takes more than 20 minutes before the food is served
• The manager and workers are unfriendly with poor co-ordination

According to the reports published by Lichtenberg (2012), some of the stalwarts in the business of fast food like KFC, McDonald’s, Subway and Domino’s are successful in in capturing and maintaining market share. The main reason cited against this is high prevalence of menu shuffling and incorporation of new items in the menu list. However, the menu card of Happy Meal shows no significant incorporation over the last 5 years and this can be regarded as the principal reason behind the poor customer retention and new customer attraction (Meyer & Van Vann, 2013).

Messy or dirty kitchen can hamper the quality of the food. Messy kitchen invites in rodents. According to reports published in ABC news (2018), Los Mariachi was suddenly closed on 18^th January 2018 after the inspectors spotted rodents and live roaches in the kitchen along with perforation in the ceiling and walls.  Moreover, messy kitchen is also another reason behind the delay in food delivery. Messy kitchen hampers the productivity of the staffs and thereby delaying the delivery of the ordered food. Delay in food delivery hampers the overall public image of the restaurant (Oliveira et al., 2015).

A restaurant needs to bestow its customer with safe and comfortable environment. This enables the customer to enjoy their food.  At the same time the restaurant needs to utilize its area at the highest possible manner so that it can maximize its sales per day. However, the furniture inside the restaurant is out dated and not arranged properly and that is hampering the overall service quality.

The kitchen staffs lack moral encouragement from the management staffs. Moreover, the management staffs do not provide adequate advice and critics to the employees. Whenever the employees commit any mistakes they rarely give advice to improve on quality and this demotivate the staffs. The sense of demotivation gets reflected in their unfriendly approach of greeting the customers (Kanyan, Ngana & Voon, 2016).

Findings from Customer and Staff Surveys

Wait staffs are responsible for creating a positive atmosphere within the restaurant and this impression is dependent on the appearance of the wait staffs too like their uniform shoes, and personal hygiene and general attitudes. However, lack of proper uniform and hair gloves reflects lack of hygiene, creating a negative impact upon the customer.

Conclusion

This from the above discussion it can be concluded that Happy meal in spite of having more than 5-years of experience in the food chain lacks in innovation, hygiene and managerial issues. The gaps in these three factors are principal reason behind the drop in the sales value of restaurant among the contemporary market.

The change in the restaurant menu must be seasonal like dur9ng the summer, preferences must be given towards innovative chilled beverages and fruit salads while in winters there must be free-flowing list of spicy food. This seasonal versatility will help to grab customer attraction (Meyer & Van Vann, 2013). The change in the restaurant menu should also get reflected in terms of change in overall catalogue. This is because restaurant’s physical menu is the primary signal to a customer's impending restaurant experience. The change in the font style, background colour and beautification of the menu card increase the brand image of restaurant and aesthetically designed menu card help in influencing customer's perceptions over the image of the restaurant along with perceived quality of the services cape (Magnini & Kim, 2016).

If the service and delivery is good, the restaurant is going to benefit from advertising however, if the activity is of poor quality then the company will be motivated enough to uplift their overall service delivery (Oliveira et al., 2015). So in order to improve on their service delivery, Happy Meal needs to work on their overall décor and furniture arrangements inside the kitchen. For example incorporation of automatic machine like dish washers will help to reduce the work-load during the pick hours of business and thereby helping to work in order organised manner (Kanyan, Ngana & Voon, 2016). Moreover, a kitchen must also have a well-functioning exhaust and vacuum cleaner for regular cleaning purpose. Kanyan, Ngana and Voon (2016), has also opined that the kitchen staffs should have prepared ingredients before the opening of the restaurant for that day like onions, chillies, garlic and ginger. This preparatory steps will help to avoid the last minute hassle and thereby helping the staffs to work into an organise manner. The carpet area of the kitchen must also be spacious, enabling the staffs to conduct their operational task smoothly (Kanyan, Ngana & Voon, 2016).

In order to work on their furniture quality, the owners of restaurant need a complete revamp on their style of furniture keeping in mid the color of the internal decor of the room. Matching the décor with the internal ambience will make the environment of the restaurant more appealing. Moreover, the furniture inside the room needs to be arranged in an ordered manner in order to fully utilize the space (Kanyan, Ngana & Voon, 2016).

In order to obtain the synchronization between the managers and the kitchen staffs and waiting boys, training and development is mandatory. On-Job-Training (OJT) will help the staffs to get hands-on experience to handle the pressure under normal working conditions and will also provide an opportunity to the manager or the supervisor of the kitchen to develop a good relationship with the employees. Learning is workplace is one of the effective means that can be used to develop a healthy relationship between the manager and the staffs (Kanyan, Ngana & Voon, 2016).

The dress code of the wait staffs needs a complete makeover. In order to break the monotony of the monochrome white and black uniform, the management of the Happy Meals can harmonize the look of their staffs with the interior design. This will also help the customers to recognize the staffs among the crowd (Zoobi & Adjei, 2018).

References

Kanyan, A., Ngana, L., & Voon, B. H. (2016). Improving the Service Operations of Fast-food Restaurants. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 224, 190-198.

Lichtenberg, A. L. (2012). A Historical Review of Five of the Top Fast Food Restaurant Chains to Determine the Secrets of Their Success.

Magnini, V. P., & Kim, S. (2016). The influences of restaurant menu font style, background color, and physical weight on consumers’ perceptions. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 53, 42-48.

Meyer, A., & Van Vann, M. (2013). How to Open and Operate a Restaurant. Rowman & Littlefield.

Mok, C., Sparks, B., & Kadampully, J. (2013). Service quality management in hospitality, tourism, and leisure. Routledge.

Oliveira, L. F., Schneider, D., de Souza, J. M., & Rodrigues, S. A. (2015, May). Leveraging the crowd collaboration to monitor the waiting time of day-to-day services. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD), 2015 IEEE 19th International Conference on (pp. 109-114). IEEE.

Ryan, W. (2018). Dirty Dining: Los Mariachi's forced to shut down for roaches, rodents in the kitchen. WFTS. Retrieved 12 February 2018, from https://www.abcactionnews.com/money/consumer/dirty-dining/dirty-dining-los-mariachis-forced-to-shut-down-for-roaches-rodents-in-the-kitchen

Zoobi, W., & Adjei, D. (2018). Etiquette for hospitality and services. Myjoyonline.com. Retrieved 12 February 2018, from https://www.myjoyonline.com/opinion/2018/february-4th/etiquette-for-hospitality-and-services.php