McDonald’s Call Centers, Outsourced Homework and Prayers

Posted in Outsourcing & Delegating  Print This

     I’ve been listening to Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin on my iPod this week (and thank you Brandon Frank in Draper, UT, for suggesting that I use Audible.com to download audiobooks rather than buy them printed) and I heard something so interesting that I leapt off my elliptical machine and had to jot it down–so if you’re using one as you read this, be sure to do the same.

     Here are three examples of things that other organizations have thought of to outsource.  I’m not saying I’m a proponent or conponent of any of them, but each of them is one of those things that make you go hmm:

     1) A few McDonald’s branches have limited the practice of paying people to sit and do nothing by getting rid of the employee in the first drive-thru window (formerly me, circa 1995) that asks you what you’d like to eat.  Instead, the voice you hear from the speaker comes from someone in a call center elsewhere in the country who takes your order and sends it over the internet to the people at the food pickup window who hands you your food.

      2) The Catholic Church gives you the option of outsourcing prayers by sending your prayers to a priest who will offer them for you, or in addition to your own.  From what the book said, this normally has a fee of $5 associated with it, but when you send a prayer request to a priest in India, it is only 90 cents.

     3) One college student found someone in India to do his homework for him for a small fee. 

     If people are outsourcing through these three ways, imagine what is possible for you to outsource to someone else, at a low fee, from a remote location, to do for you–either for your business or for you personally.  I included these examples because they show the outer limits of what can be outsourced that you might not have thought of.

     If you can think of anything to top these, please let me know and I’ll add them to my blog.