What you need to know

• McDonald’s Australia has transformed its complaints system into a revenue driver, with digitally resolved issues now yielding increased customer spend.
• A centralised, digital customer service team has replaced fragmented in-store complaint handling, freeing restaurant staff and delivering rapid, trackable outcomes. Resolution times have improved by 96 per cent.
• Digital vouchers are driving return visits and upsell. Customers compensated for issues like missing items are returning to spend more than just their replacement value, turning service recovery into a sales channel.
• McDonald’s has shifted beyond just Net Promoter Score to Complaints per Million Guest Counts (CPM) as a key CX metric, offering clearer benchmarking and driving store accountability.
• CPM dashboards embedded in McDonald’s Moment platform have driven an 11% increase in access by store teams, fuelling a data-driven culture of operational improvement.
• Standardisation cuts hidden ops costs: A chaotic, inconsistent legacy complaints process has been replaced with a streamlined, automated system that delivers both cost savings and brand loyalty gains.

McDonald's Australia has changed how it deals with customer complaints, and the new approach is driving revenue growth, according to Michael Dominish, Head of Customer Experience.

Speaking on a recently released InMoment podcast, Dominish revealed how the fast-food giant has turned its feedback function into a more finely tuned commercial asset by implementing an approach that resolves complaints faster, more consistently, and by using digital challenges that don't pull restaurant managers away from the shop floor.

The company has centralised and digitised its customer service function, removing the resolution burden from in-restaurant staff and shifting it to a national team equipped to deliver speedy, trackable outcomes. Resolution times improved by 96 per cent, said Dominish.

For the fast food giant, it has also quietly redefined what “service recovery” means in a business built on volume. More importantly, the new complaint resolution is now delivering positive ROI. McDonald’s issues digital vouchers to customers with legitimate complaints, such as a missing cheeseburger or a cold coffee.

Previously, poor service was costing share of wallet as visitor frequency declined. But now, those customers aren’t just coming back; they’re spending more.

“We’re seeing this really awesome impact on spend from those customers who are then looking to buy additional items on top of what they’re getting a replacement for,” said Dominish.

The lesson is that CX doesn’t just reduce churn, it can actively drive transaction growth. 

The QSR has also moved beyond net promoter scores when it comes to defining CX success. and is now increasingly focusing on something more actionable: Complaints Per Million Guest Counts (CPM). This metric, which tracks the volume of negative customer incidents per million visits, enables apples-to-apples benchmarking across the more an 1000  McDonald's stores in Australia. That, in turn, provides franchisees with clearer accountability and real-time visibility into performance variance.

“We've come from a traditional top-box view of the world, where we focused on chasing promoters and highly satisfied customers, really rewarding and recognising our restaurants that sit at the top of that cohort,” said Dominish. “What we've been doing now that we have better visibility around the complaints coming through, is trying to balance that with some of our more impactful metrics around complaints. We have a metric we track here internally at McDonald's, which is our complaints per million guest counts.”

The CPM reports are resonating with store owners. Hosted in McDonald’s existing InMoment platform, the reports have driven an 11 per cent increase in access to dashboards by store teams, which Dominish sees as clear evidence that franchisees are leaning into the data.

Crucially, this isn’t just a metrics change, it’s a cultural shift. McDonald’s is betting that complaints, not compliments, offer the fastest route to service improvements, cost control, and ultimately, commercial upside.

Missing Cheeseburgers

Under the old system, if you were unlucky enough to arrive home after a trip to the drive-through, and discover you were missing a cheeseburger, “there were 1,000 different ways that one simple inquiry could have been handled – and a real lack of visibility into how our restaurants were closing the loop with customers. It was a very different world compared to how it looks today," said Dominish.

Each of Australia’s 1,000+ restaurants had its own process, or lack thereof. Complaints might be ignored, mishandled, or inconsistently resolved. The cost? Not just in loyalty, but in wasted manager hours, reputational damage, and process fragmentation. Those missing cheeseburgers could create a degree of chaos, not to mention hangry customers.

With the InMoment platform integrated across feedback and CRM, McDonald’s has real-time visibility over who’s handling what, when, and crucially, with what result. Restaurant teams are freed up to focus on operations, while the central CX function delivers faster, more consistent customer outcomes as the response path is standardised, automated, and data-informed. That’s paying dividends both in hard-dollar savings and soft-power brand loyalty.

“It was a no-brainer once we demonstrated the average monthly cost savings for them. We absolutely led with the benefit to our customers and the impact on their future spend and visitation rates, but we also highlighted the financial gain of moving toward this model,” Dominish said.