(Ian Mitroff, Gus Anagnos: ” Managing crises before they happen”)
1. What went wrong?
As we can see from the text of the case the several things went wrong in McDonalds Argentina. 1. First of all there were a lot of accidents of people compliance on the company’s food. It was quite usual for the call-center of Arcos Dorados to receive the customer calls concerning the bad state of health after eating something in McDonalds.
2. Indeed there was a special procedure of treating those clienteles in order to calm them and satisfy. But seems like it was very standard and therefore pretty vulnerable. When Jorge Roel appealed to customer-center, they asked him special questions, gave some directions and told that the company will call him back in max 5 days. Probably they didn’t call or didn’t give him an appropriate answer. Because, as it was written in the case, Jorge Roel regularly called to Arcos Dorados and asked the same question: “What are you going to do to me?” We Assume he wanted to get some money compensation, but the company couldn’t provide him with such recompense.
3. The company didn’t cooperate with mass-media. When the crisis occurred, all reporters were interested in business of McDonald Company exposed to danger by harmful bacteria. And McDonald Argentina executives tried to not cooperate with the journalists because they didn’t want to approve their crisis situation. In other words they wanted to make their emergency invisible. That was a huge mistake because the cooperation with mass-media is a perfect source of customers trust or distrust and apprehensions.
4. They relayed on the honesties of the governmental laboratory analysis, as we can see it was totally wrong. The governmental analysis was showing that they had the problems with hygiene,