Burger King has long been known as the chief rival to McDonalds and home to one of the scariest and creepiest mascots in advertising history. But for me, the local Burger King is an amazing anomaly in lessons on running a business.
See, this business has managed to consistently deliver poor service over the years while still staying in business. It became a joke in my family that ordering from the local business was a game in Russian Roulette. Orders never seemed to come out right. There was a streak where I think I had 5 visits and, without fail, they failed to get the order correct. Once I went there and ordered just a soda.
One soda.
They gave me the wrong one.
Really? I ordered one lousy soft drink and you still screwed it up?
At this point most reasonable people would just say, "Don't go there anymore."
To them I say, "No shit?" Because that's what I did. If I was asked where to go for a fast food outing, the local BK was definitely on the bottom of that list. I told people I knew that I despised that place and it was a den of incompetence.
My son is still young enough to not care about such things. "Good enough" meant he had his cheeseburger or croissant sandwich. I'm not sure why he adores the food there. Perhaps part of it is not having to pay actual money to be inconvenienced by details such as, "Do I really want to get up and return this thing I didn't order and ask for my actual order?"
They've gotten better,...but at this point I don't really care.
Sin one: they rarely got my order right. Even simple ones. Like for a single drink.
The other day he was begging to go there for breakfast. It served as a source of more bafflement because I had their sausage, egg and cheese croissan'wich and the sausage tasted burned. Not just grilled...kind of charred on the surface of the patty. But at least it wasn't a piece of charcoal through and through. Edible, but the taste left something to be desired.
Sin two: the food prep doesn't seem very...consistent?
Many years ago...my wife says it was around 2007...my son was with his grandparents when he had an incident at this restaurant. This Burger King has their own play area, with slides and climby parts and...I don't know what else. But my son somehow had a matchbox car drop into a gap in the play area jungle-gym-ish climbing area.
He reached into the gap to retrieve the toy and the plastic pieces pinched together, entrapping him. I found out after everything was said and done and the fire department had left that my son was okay, just a little rattled. I don't think he ever went into the play area again. Yeah...the workers were clueless about what to do, and the fire department helped free him.
He managed to get stuck despite being supervised in a public restaurant playground area. And it was good he was being watched...I shudder to think of what happened if the play area had shifted just right that it could have crunched his arm.
There are certain risks to playing in a playground, and we accept that. But this was more of a maintenance issue. And it created a safety issue. I wanted to contact Burger King and let them know that maybe they might want to be careful about this...you know...inspect their playground equipment once in awhile.
Sin three: child-eating playground equipment.
Contacting Burger King was a challenge, to say the least. They had no Twitter account (Twitter launched in 2006, after all...); I could find no contact on their web page, there was no sign of an email address. The rest of the world had some form of electronic contact. Burger King gave customers an electronic middle finger.
Not kidding. A quick check on the Internet Archive at http://web.archive.org/web/20071006000851/http://burgerking.com/companyinfo/contactus.aspx (late 2007) came right out and said "E-mail communication is not accepted." In 2007. What the hell?
Sin four: about as tech savvy as a three year old, or perhaps K-Mart.
I did something that really just made me angry. I wrote them a letter. An actual, dead-tree, ink on paper letter. I mean, it was printed...I'm not a luddite and I know how to use a word processor. But it still irritated me that asking them (or their franchisees) to have some standard of not smooshing children in their playground equipment really shouldn't cost me money.
What I wanted was an acknowledgement that they'd do something to keep other kids from getting eaten by equipment. What I got was bupkis. I never heard back from Burger King. Not even some offhanded blame against their franchisee, pretending they have no control over how their image and name is represented. Nada. Zip.
My letter went into some great abyss of customer fuck-offs.
Sin five: at least have the decency to acknowledge something like this. There was a fire department called, you bastards.
What got me musing on the myriad reasons I avoid this BK when at all possible is my son's recent insistence...begging, really...that his special day out include a trip to Burger King for morning breakfast. I opened a web browser and it connected to my employer's website. I noticed that there was an oddly shaded and content-empty bar along the bottom of my web page.
Viewing the source showed some issues with loading something from an advertisement link. Which was strange, since my employer doesn't shove any weirdball ads like this at their users (I think it was blanked out because of an ad-block extension active in my browser at the time, rendering whatever their ad bar was supposed to be, blank, instead.)
I opened a new browser tab and navigated to my employer again, but this time used the https: link. That time the advertiser disappeared. See, using an encrypted point-to-point connection makes it difficult to inject extra HTML into my browsing session without me knowing...
...which meant Burger King, the company that for so many years makes it hard to actually contact them with any feedback and displayed a stunning lack of customer interaction and tech savviness, was injecting unwanted ads (and probably monitoring) my web browsing over their wifi.
Sin six: You're monitoring and injecting content into my browsing? Really?
I'm assuming that there was something about this buried in the legalese agreed upon when clicking to use their wifi, although to be honest, I don't remember clicking on anything in order to get on their wifi. And when it comes to public wifi, there's always the danger of your session being hijacked if you're not using a VPN or some other form of encryption. But still...another reason to dislike you?
I'm not sure how you stay in business other than being convenient for people in an area that doesn't have a lot of income. You're close to a retirement home, and getting to the Dunkin' Donuts would mean crossing the street in an area that has horrible crosswalk support. Maybe the Walmart model is at play; cheap food is cheap, so who cares about customer experience?
I even made a passive aggressive complaint on Twitter about their monitoring of web traffic and injecting code into the session (believe it or not, BK is on Twitter now...they joined in 2010. Yeah...little late to the party.) They said nothing. I've made irritated remarks about Dell and Time Warner and had them reply to me without even trying to talk to them. BK doesn't give a damn.
Sin seven: you monitor customer web traffic but not your mentions in Twitter. Get with the program.
Last I went to their website to contact them about the web-jacking. I clicked on the contact us page. It redirects to a "tellusaboutus.com" website.
They outsourced the "contact us."
A totally outside company handles "contact us" for Burger King.
Sin eight: ...I...no. That's enough.
Many companies are at least trying to not suck. They show signs of understanding how to engage with customers. They monitor for signs that customers want to communicate with them, want help, want feedback, want acknowledgement (hey, hear of Netflix? Or Dominoes? Or any of the dozens of other companies that will get in the news with some playful banter on Twitter with customers?)
Most companies at a minimum make it easy to email them with complaints or suggestions. Hell, I've had companies that pester me for feedback via email.
Burger King is like a digital brick wall. They seem to actively not want customer feedback.
...I suppose that kind of explains quite a bit.
I'll look forward to what the next five years holds for Burger King. If McD's is feeling the financial pinch, it may not be long before Burger King topples over. Can't say I'll miss them.
No comments:
Post a Comment