A viral TikTok video demonstrating this new feature racked up 700k views and hundreds of comments, which are equally divided between praise and cringe for this personalization effort.
As Spinal Tap famously opined, it's a fine line between clever and stupid.
Which is it for you??
Note that consumers are allowed to opt-out of the menu board greeting, although comments suggest it's not intuitive to do so.
To me, this is just a nice gesture that confirms that McDonald's knows who you are.
But evidently, the customer's name also shows up on the screen of the drive-thru order taker, and the original idea was that they would speak that name when the car pulls up.
"Welcome, Jay. I see you've ordered a quarter pounder with cheese again. How do you feel about your life choices?"
THAT version would be too much for
me.
I'm not sure why, but for some reason reading my name on the menu board is comforting. Hearing the drive-thru person say it is icky.
AI combined with 5G is going to make this kind of on-the-fly personalization easy to execute.
But at what point does personalization create a customer experience deficiency?
Without testing - and credit to McDonald's in Australia for doing so - it's hard to know
where the line is, and when you've gone too far.
What examples of borderline personalization disorder have you experienced?
