Taco Bell Case Study
Team Consulting Report
Introduction
Taco Bell is an American chain of fast food restaurant and it serves more than 2 billion customers each year in more than 6500 restaurants. With a rapid business expansion, Taco Bell suffered a serious management failure that was a photo emerged on Twitter and it directly showed a Taco Bell employee urinated on nachos inside the restaurant. After that the incident received local and international news coverage. This resulted brought several crises to Taco Bell. The first one is the increasing concerns about Taco Bell’s food safety. People would doubt whether the food hygiene has been met when they decided to have a meal outside. The second one is that Taco Bell may lose its brand reputation when social media has a huge impact on customer and company relationships. Customers may lose their confidence of Taco Bell and some of them would not choose Taco Bell again. In this way, the company would experience some economic losses when demand of fast food decrease. In addition, insufficient in its management system would cause more inappropriate behavior in the workplace and such an incident might occurs again and bring the crisis again for the company and the management’s ignorance of impact of social media is potential crisis as well. This report aims at analyzing the root causes as well as providing recommendations for Taco Bell to mitigate the effect of the incident to the business life and making a team reflection assessment.
Potential Root Causes
- Recruitment Process
The first one is the weakness in recruitment process. Employees are one of the great assets in any company and they are the key to keep customers happy and establish a lasting reputation, consequently human resource manager should not recruit such an employee with low personal quality. A rational employee would not urinate on a plate of nachos in the workplace. Did Taco Bell actually check on employee’s background? Was this employee really a good fit for the job? The company should have understood what type of individuals it wants to recruit to obtain its recruitment objectives (Breaugh & Starke, 2000). If the recruitment processes have been more robust, this problem could be prevented in the first place.
- Ineffective in Management System.
The second root cause is insufficient in its management system. Taco Bell’s senior management not takes action to deal with the issues in the first place and ignored the negative reviews post by others. Meanwhile, this incident reflects the lack of staff training in Taco Bell. Comprehensive staff training should include professional skills, corporate culture, and professional ethics. This process makes a great contribution to prevent unethical behavior in the workplace. Effective training not only helps the employees to adapt their job more quickly, but also provides a guideline for employees’ behaviors, so that they will not do something inappropriate.
C. Impact of Social Media
Overlooked the power of social media, Taco Bell lacked the social media activities and strategies to tackle the issues. These days, people are used to sharing blog posts with Twitter or Facebook. However, if the posts are negative, they can be harmful to a company’s reputation. So it is necessary for Taco Bell to formulate the right social media strategies to drive the market. Moreover when the photo was firstly posted on Twitter, Taco Bell was supposed to impede the spread of this photo while they did nothing about that. As a result, the company image was damaged more seriously and led more misunderstanding about Taco Bell.
Major Stakeholders Affected
Employees
From the employee’s perspective, they are influenced both positively and negatively. The positive part is that they will be more careful about the company rules and operating standards after the crisis. The negative part is that employee might wonder what was going on with their company and they may lose heart about the company development prospects, which will probably influence their motivation for working. After this event, the company will enforce the company rules more strictly, and then employees would work under a greater pressure.
Customers
From the customer’s perspective, after this event, those current customers may lose their trust and stop going to Taco Bell since urinating on the nachos would make people feel sick. They may inform their friends and relatives to consider about this event. In this way, both present and potential customers are affected.
Shareholders
From the shareholder’s perspective, this event may result in a decrease of both the share price and the total value of the company. Thus, stockholders might start to consider whether they should sell some or all of their shares of Taco Bell’s because investors might lose confidence in the company’s future. As a result, the share price becomes increasingly fluctuated.