Starbucks Delivering Customer Service

STARBUCKS DELIVERING CUSTOMER SERVICE

Starbucks is an American Company which in late 2002 suffered from a gap in customers’ satisfaction, they lost the connection between satisfying their customer and growing the business. For this reason, Starbucks wanted to improve its service, increasing the speed of service, and adding an additional 20 hours of labor, per week, per each 4,500 stores, at a cost of an extra $40 million per year.

But, in my opinion, this is not the only problem that the company had. The fact that, they did not have a marketing officer, and had three separate groups as a marketing department, could not be good for its market research.

Starbucks’ brand strategy is based on 3 items:

* Coffee: They offer the highest-quality coffee in the world, sourced from the Africa, Central and South America, and Asia-Pacific regions.

* Service : “Customer intimacy”

* Atmosphere: The seating areas that most Starbucks had, makes people want to stay.

Its objective was to establish Starbucks as the “most recognized and respected brand in the world”. To achieve this goal, in 2002, the company focused its growth on “retail expansion” and “ product innovation”.

Apart from its brand strategy, Starbucks has a service’s policy, based on “Just Say Yes” avoiding win the argument and lose the customer.

PROBLEM ANALYSIS AND SOLUTIONS

As I have said, the main Starbucks’ problem was its customers’ satisfaction, and although they thought about improving speed of service to solve this problem, I think that they could also do other things.

Firstly, they should analyze why their customer act as they act, I mean, they should ask them some questions in order to know what their feelings are or what they really want or expect from Starbucks. If they do that, they would be able to know if the satisfaction lack of their customer is due to the speed of service or it is because other problems related to service, atmosphere or product.

Secondly, if they really...