Starbucks

3.1 Customer Experience

Customer experience refers to the cognitive and affective outcome of the customer’s exposure to, or interaction with, a company’s people, processes, technologies, products, services and other outputs (Buttle, 2009). Starbucks ensures that the experiences that they provide to their customers are always pleasant at every interaction and also create meaningful moments and continuously looking out for new choices and experience each time customers visit any Starbucks outlets (Starbucks Investor Relations, 2013).

Starbucks can be regarded as a great example in providing excellent customer experience to their customers all around the world. Their uniqueness in their marketing style has enabled the company to grow and keep getting their customers to visit Starbucks and enjoy their coffee and experience. Starbucks barely promotes its coffee in the media, but they use an unconventional and inexpensive “Word-of-Mouth” to promote itself as a social media strategy. Every company would always try its best to decrease their negative word-of-mouth and increase the positive word-of-mouth in order to add value on their products and services. To ensure that building long relationships with customers, Starbucks always provide high quality products and services to their customers and customers will talk about their experience in Starbucks and publicity will be generated (Ved, 2012).

Customer experience concepts consists of three elements, they are touchpoints, moment of truth and engagement, which will be discussed together using Starbucks (Buttle, 2009).

Touchpoint occurs when customers came into contact with company’s products, services, communications, places, people, processes or technologies (Buttle, 2009). It is well known that Starbucks’ baristas interactions with customers were always the highlight of the experience, but Starbucks recently found out that customers who chose the option of drive-through will miss out on the experience of...