> UNIVERSIDAD CATOLICA BOLIVIANASAN PABLO:ESCUELA DE LA PRODUCCION Y LA COMPETITIVIDAD<

Modelo difuso orientado model applied to customer satisfaction oriented to fast food industry
Gusty Cardenas, Nicole Gumucio, Govinda Rivera members of Euroresidentes
AbstractFuzzy logic is an innovative technique that model human decision making, evaluations and assessment. It can be applied in different business branches such as evaluating customer satisfaction. In the case of the fast food industry in La Paz, Bolivia, we believe its very competitive and many firms need to create competitive advantages in order to increase their market share because many of them have failed to identify the shortcomings in creating this important success factor. In this project we have identified the four main factors that have a major influence in the customer satisfaction, and therefore, in the level of success of a company. These factors are: Time, Quality, Accessibility and Promotions. Index TermsFuzzy logic, MATLAB, Customer Satisfaction, Fast Food Industry, Time, Quality, Accessibility, Promotions.

by generating high levels of customer satisfaction a company can achieve customer loyalty, brand image, increase market power, profitability and long term market participation. I. GENERAL OBJECTIVE 1. To analyze the fuzzy logic techniques for business applications, in order to evaluate customer satisfaction in the fast food industry. II. SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES 1. 2. 3. To identify the key factors (inputs) that have a great influence for the customer satisfaction. To identify all possible rules in order to determine the level of customer satisfaction with the given inputs. To develop a standard model of customer satisfaction evaluation in order to apply it in real fast food companies. To demonstrate the direct relation between the customer satisfaction and the company success for helping management decisions. III. LIMITS This Fuzzy Logic model cant be applied to: Mobile fast food business. Informal fast food business. That means that isnt registered in Fundempresa. Any restaurant that is not considered in the fast food category. Restaurants that are not located inside of the zona sur limits of La Paz, Bolivia. IV. SCOPE We are taking into consideration specific characteristics of the La Paz society, which is why the fuzzy logic model that is presented can only be applied in fast food business that have the following characteristics: Fast food restaurants that have a specific address and own property.

I. INTRODUCTION

Fuzzy Logic concept is a very useful tool that can be applied for the evaluation of different business structures. In this document we apply the Fuzzy Logic concept in the fast food industry. We analyze the different characteristics and the critical success factors (such as time, quality, accessibility and promotion) that have an impact in the customer satisfaction in this industry. Each factor has a different influence value in it and its important for companies to identify their stren gths and weaknesses within thesefactors in order to increase their success. The goal of this project is to develop standards that a company can effectively follow in order to identify the issues that the company needs to improve in order to increase the degree of customer satisfaction.
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II. BACKGROUND In the absence of a method that could evaluate key factors in order to determine and measure the customer satisfaction, many companies in the fast food industry fail to identify the shortcomings in creating this important success factor. The fast food industry in La Paz, Bolivia is very competitive and many firms need to create competitive advantages in order to increase their market share, overcome competition and add value to their services; which is why many companies have failed to stay in the market. We believe that

> UNIVERSIDAD CATOLICA BOLIVIANASAN PABLO:ESCUELA DE LA PRODUCCION Y LA COMPETITIVIDAD< Fundempresa registration Fast food restaurants located in the zona sur of La Paz, Bolivia. Fast food business that is registered by SII (Servicio de Impuestos Internos)

MATLAB has evolved over a period of years with input from many users. In university environments, it is the standard instructional tool for introductory and advanced courses in mathematics, engineering, and science. In industry, MATLAB is the tool of choice for high productivity research, development, and analysis.4 MATLAB features a family of application-specific solutions called toolboxes. Very important to most users of MATLAB, toolboxes allow you to learn and apply specialized technology. Toolboxes are comprehensive collections of MATLAB functions (M files) that extend the MATLAB environment to solve particular cases of problems. Areas in which toolboxes are available include signal processing, control systems, neural network, fuzzy logic and many others. 5 Customer satisfaction:Customer satisfaction is a highly personal assessment that is greatly influenced by individual expectations. Some definitions are based on the observation that customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction results from either the confirmation or disconfirmation of individual expectations regarding a service or product. Customer satisfaction differs depending on the situation and the product or service. A customer may be satisfied with a product or service, an experience, a purchase decision, a salesperson, store, service provider, or an attribute or any of these. Some researchers completely avoid satisfaction as a measurement objective because it is too fuzzy an idea to serve as a meaningful benchmark. Because customer satisfaction is a highly variable assessment that every individual makes based on his/her own information, expectations, direct contact and interaction, and impact, it makes sense to involve and consult consumers when designing customer satisfaction approaches. 6 Fast food industry:The fast food industry, also known as Quick Service Restaurants (QSR), has been serving up tasty morsels for as long as people have lived in cities. Fast food franchises focus on high volume, low cost and high speed product. Frequently food is preheated or precooked and served to-go, though many locations also offer seating for on-site consumption. For stands, kiosks or sit-down locations, food is standardized and shipped from central locations. Consumers enjoy being able to get a familiar meal in each location, and menus and marketing are the same in every location.7 VI. PRACTICAL FRAMEWORK With this end in view, we focused on important factors such as time, quality, accessibility, and promotion in order to provide a standard that can facilitate the companies certain rules to evaluate and improve their operations in order to achieve high levels of customer satisfaction and therefore achieve success and a competitive advantage.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=676032 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=676032 6 http://www.cssp.org/publications/constituents-co-invested-inchange/customer-satisfaction/customer-satisfaction-what-research-tells-us.pdf 7 http://www.franchisehelp.com/industry-reports/fast-food-industry-report
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V. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Fuzzy logic:A way to represent variation or imprecision in logic. The use of natural language in logic or approximate reasoning.The concept of Fuzzy Logic (FL) was conceived by Lotfi Zadeh, a professor at the University of California at Berkley. Its a way of processing data by allowing partial set membership rather than crisp set membership or nonmembership. FL is a problem-solving control system methodology that lends itself to implementation in systems ranging from simple, small, embedded micro-controllers to large, networked, multi-channel PC or workstation-based data acquisition and control systems. It can be implemented in hardware, software, or a combination of both. FL provides a simple way to arrive at a definite conclusion based upon vague, ambiguous, imprecise, noisy, or missing input information. FL's approach to control problems mimics how a person would make decisions, only much faster1 Fuzzy logic is an innovative technique that model human decision making, evaluations and assessment. It has been widely applied in industrial control, home appliances and automotive industries. Fuzzy systems have been proved to be cost effective and ease to use.2 Fuzzy logic is all about the relative importance of precision: how important is it to be exactly right when a rough answer will do? Fuzzy logic is a fascinating area of research because it does a good job of trading off between significance and precision- something that humans have been managing for a very long time. Fuzzy logic is a convenient way to map and input space to an output space. This is the starting point of everything else, and the great emphasis here is on the world convenient.3 MATLAB: is a high performance language for technical computer. It integrates computation, visualization, and programming in an easy to use environment where problems and solutions are expressed in familiar mathematical notation. Typical uses include: Math and computation Algorithm development Modeling, simulation, prototyping Data analysis, exploration and visualization Application development, including graphical user interface building.

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http://www.seattlerobotics.org/encoder/mar98/fuz/fl_part1.html http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=676032 3 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=676032

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B. Quality The quality of the service is the key to a successful restaurant. When a restaurant offers great service, the likelihood for the customers to return is great. The quality of the service can be perceived in four different areas: Friendly service: this mean that employees must serve immediately to the customers. A company must train their employees so they can provide a good and friendly service. Capable employees: That means that employees should be part of the restaurant, knowing all the process and all the characteristics of the products they have in order to respond questions customers can make. Adequately employees: A restaurant must have really good employees that can serve the customers in a good way. They have to know what they are doing. They must know the real objectives of the restaurant and have received training in order to provide an efficient service to the customers. High quality products: Having high quality products means that they have the best ingredients and that the products the restaurant offers are very tasty.

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INPUTS/FACTORS

We identify four key factors that determine the customer satisfaction. These factors will be explained in order of the degree of influence they have in this important issue: A. Time In the food industry in general, time and efficiency are important factors to increase customer's satisfaction. Depending on the kind of food and the level of sophistication of these, a client's expects to wait the minimum amount of time, as it is possible. In a fast food industry, time is a critical success factor, and companies must be able to develop efficient operation processes in order to deliver the food quickly without losing their quality standards. There are two categories of time within a restaurant: Time of getting attended: This is the amount of time that takes for a waiter or an assistant to serve the clients and take their orders. This is completely related with the customer's satisfaction because no client enjoys waiting for a long time for the waiter to attend them, that makes them feel unwanted or not valuable. It is important for food companies to develop good and efficient strategies in this sector in order to be successful. Time of food serving:This refers to the amount of time that takes to get the food after it was ordered. This is as equally important as time of getting attended because clients can get impatient or hungry if they wait for long amounts of time and its a decisive factor in the decision making process of a customer.

C. Accessibility The ability to access or get to a product or service to the general public. This factor is determinative as it has a major influence on consumer satisfaction. The more available for the consumer, the greater the attraction towards it, and customers will not prefer any substitute that is more within their reach. Fast food restaurants must look for strategic locations, such as centric streets or highly crowded places in order to increase their accessibility.

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D. Promotions Is a marketing tool used to attract customers by using short term incentives to consumers and members of the distribution channels, This factor is very important because it increasesthe purchase or selling of the product or service. This is an strategic approach that restaurants and fast food branches use in order to increase their market share and customer loyalty.

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factors that are not having a good performance and none of the principal inputs have a low performance. Low Customer Satisfaction: where the company is not providing a good service in the matters of time or quality.

VII. CONCLUSION 2. RULES The following table will show all the possible combinations of the four inputs (time, quality, accessibility and promotions) that determine the level of customer satisfaction in the fast food industry. After completing the academic project we accomplished our objectives concluding on the following points: 1. The key factors that have the most influence in customer satisfaction are Time, quality, accessibility and promotions. By making all the possible combinations of the four inputs that influence customer satisfaction we determined there were 81 rules in total that resulted in three levels of satisfaction (Low, Medium and High) We were able to develop a standard model of customer satisfaction evaluation that can be applied in real fast food companies. We demonstrated the direct relation between the customer satisfaction and the company success for helping management decisions.

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OUTPUTS There are only three possible results from the 81 different combinations of the four inputs: a. High customer satisfaction: Where the combination of the factors quality, time, accessibility and promotions present high levels of performance. In order to have a high customer satisfaction, at least one of the most influencing inputs ( time and quality) must have a high performance. Medium Customer Satisfaction: Where some of the

After accomplishing these specific objectives we were able to analyze the fuzzy logic techniques for business applications, in order to evaluate customer satisfaction in the fast food industry. VIII. RECOMMENDATIONS Because the fuzzy logic model has proved to be a useful tool to evaluate the customer satisfaction, we recommend that more fast food companies should apply it to identify their strengths and weaknesses in this matter, in order to improve their services and be successful.

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> UNIVERSIDAD CATOLICA BOLIVIANASAN PABLO:ESCUELA DE LA PRODUCCION Y LA COMPETITIVIDAD< The fuzzy logic model can be designed for evaluating or predicting future consequences in different aspects or situations of other types of business and industries.

REFERENCES

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http://www.seattlerobotics.org/encoder/mar98/fuz/fl_part1.html http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=676032 http://www.cssp.org/publications/constituents-co-invested-inchange/customer-satisfaction/customer-satisfaction-what-research-tellsus.pdf

Gusty Andrea Cardenas Sarmiento: Graduated from Colegio Aleman Mariscal Braun higschool-2009, fifth semester of International Business major- Escuela de la Produccion y Competitividad, Universidad Catolica Boliviana San Pablo, member of Euroresidentes.com Paola Nicole Gumucio Cusicanqui: Graduated from Colegio Horizontes higschool-2009, fifth semester of Entrepreneurship major- Escuela de la Produccion y Competitividad, Universidad Catolica Boliviana San Pablo, member of Euroresidentes.com Flavia Govinda Rivera Teran: : Graduated from Instituto Educativo Los Pinos higschool-2009, fifth semester of International Business majorEscuela de la Produccion y Competitividad, Universidad Catolica Boliviana San Pablo, member of Euroresidentes.com