Summary of Starbucks Case

378 Words2 Pages
Starbucks: Delivering Customer Satisfaction 1. What factors accounted for the extraordinary success of Starbucks in the early 1990s? What was so compelling about the Starbucks value proposition? * First, Starbucks offered highest quality coffee and controlled most of supply chain to sustain it. Second, it worked on ‘Customer Intimacy’ to create an uplifting experience with small gestures like making eye contact, remembering name and preferences along with service time of 3 min. Third, it worked hard on creating an ambience which make their targeted affluent, white collar customers to ritualistically linger and accept it as ‘Third Place’. Starbucks also have advantage of being first mover in the industry and strategically located its stores high traffic, high visibility areas and customized menus based on demographics. * There are certain compelling ideas behind Starbucks’ ideology like, it sited customer and service as most prominent features with ‘Just Say Yes’ policy and ‘Customer Intimacy’ as mentioned before. It emphasized heavily on soft skills of partners along with hard skills and imprinted in its DNA, partner satisfaction leads to customer satisfaction. Also, it associated intangible benefits with coffee drinking and created an inviting environment to have coffee. 2. Why have Starbucks’ customer satisfaction scores declined? Has the company’s service declined, or is it simply measuring satisfaction the wrong way? * One of the major reasons for customer satisfaction scores decline can be attributed to compounded job complexity with multitude of customized drinks which resulted in less time for ‘Customer Intimacy’. It is also substantiated by the fact that 34% (Exhibit 11) customer thinks service needs improvement. Whereas, another important factor has been customer demographics change (Exhibit 8) which has resulted in 31% (Exhibit 11)

More about Summary of Starbucks Case

Open Document