Starbucks : Delivering Customer Service

Founded in 1985, Starbucks is one of the largest coffeehouse companies in the world with over 16,000 stores in 50 countries. This report evaluates major internal and external factors affecting Starbucks using various analytical techniques. Based on the Starbucks brand in UK, it identifies suitable marketing strategies for Starbucks to expand its business in the UK market within the next two years. In line with the chosen marketing strategies, recommendations for the marketing mix are discussed.

Starbucks main competitors are quick-service restaurant and specialty coffee shops. They are serving the same or similar core product as what Starbucks providing to their customer.

starbucks Corp., an international coffee and coffeehouse chain based in Seattle, Washington, has expanded rapidly since its opening in 1971. These outrageous success was due to its well-developed strategy vision which lay out the company's strategic course in developing and strengthening its business. Starbucks is a global corporation that sells authentic coffee in 30 countries, reporting revenues of nearly $5.1 billion in 2006. The main goal of Starbucks is to embrace diversity by applying the highest standards of excellence. Starbucks strives to perfect the relationship with the working class by making the service as fast as possible because they believe that every customer has their own personal rate. One

It’s a known fact that Starbucks is one of the leading brand in the market.When we analyse the market we find that Mcdonald 's and Dunkin are the competitors in the same product segment. So comparing Starbucks with these competitors will throw light on its grey areas, process and competitive edge in the market.

Starbucks is one of the most recognizable coffee retail chains in the world. Their brand focuses on high quality coffee using specialized roasting of beans from many countries around the world.

Moreover, most of the people know the brand Starbucks as the leader of the coffee industry. It is enormously successful and it comes out with no surprise that this will be used as benchmarking against the study of Dunkin’ Donuts.

Additionally with its growth strategy Starbucks seemed to have lost the ability to communicate its values to its customers. Note that Starbucks research team discovered that between 2000 and 2001 there was an increase in customers who felt that Starbucks primarily cared about making money and building more stores. This is an indication that the company lost sight of the components making up its value proposition. Customer service was a major component of Starbucks value proposition but according to the research team by 2002 it discovered that Starbucks was not meeting expectations in terms of customer satisfaction. In fact the data collected by the research team indicated that 10% of customers would like to see improvements in service especially speed of service and 19% would like to have friendlier more attentive staff.

It was believed that there was a service gap between Starbucks scores on key attributes and customer satisfaction. Furthermore, according to a poll, the speed of service delivery was the biggest concerns of customers. Overall, customers are pleased with the cleanliness, atmosphere, and product quality. However, the main problem was that waiting time was steadily increasing. I believe this one of the factors that caused the decline in satisfaction.

The story of Starbucks transformation from a small independent coffee shop tucked away in a corner of Seattle’s Pike Place Market to a cultural phenomenon spanning the globe is legendary. A number of factors have been attributed to the success - one being a keen understanding of its patrons. There are multiple methods used to obtain customer information and the value derived therein. Customer lifetime value is one.

ticket size) X (4.4 customer life years)] $921.78. Calculating sales amount for the highly satisfied customer using the same method shows an amount of [(7.2 visits/mo) X (12 months) X ($4.42 avg. ticket size) X (8.3 customer life years)] $3,169.67. The sales figure for the highly satisfied customer is nearly three and a half times as much as the satisfied customer. This is why it is very important for Starbucks to figure out how to provide more customer satisfaction. The company needs to do research to find out if quality of service has actually declined. There is always the societal perception that a large mega brand is incapable of delivering customer intimacy. This perception is not necessarily a foregone conclusion. It’s just a matter of Starbucks collecting accurate information regarding both quality and quantity of its customer service. The company needs to take a look at itself and determine if its customer service strategy had changed from 1992 to 2002. This is an era indicative of the massive growth. Starbucks needs to answer the question, “Did we lose our focus on customer service quality by concentrating too much on opening more stores?”.

Starbucks has put heavy concentration on product innovation, new product launches and branding strategies and as a result, the company has lost sight of the customer’s wants and needs. Ultimately, Starbucks is not properly or correctly measuring customer satisfaction. They are basing these scores on characteristics affecting the product, and not precisely measuring the quality of their services. As Exhibit 10 from the case study shows, Starbucks’ customers ranked a clean and convenient store as the most important attributes of creating customer satisfaction. As marketing research is beginning to reveal, this should not be the only focus. Starbucks needs to shift their priorities and rank fast service, customer experience, and atmosphere as most important, as new studies suggest.

business model may seem, there is plenty of hard work invested and financial risks taken to grow

Customers: The demographics of a usual Starbucks consumer have altered extremely in the new years. In the Starbucks case documents innovative consumers of Starbucks are younger, a smaller amount knowledgeable, low pay, less frequent visited to the coffeehouse and had very dissimilar insights. The general outlook of Starbucks is very short on 25% by novel consumers while the consistent consumers stood in 44%.Although numerous features subjective customer satisfaction, generally service and quickness of service were recognized as the greatest significant; a rapid glimpse at Starbucks 's fresh customer satisfaction reveals that consumers did in

The context change in form that Starbucks found itself competing with smaller chains that resembled its former pre-expansion model with competitors focusing in creating symbolic-expressive value and fast food restaurants that had started to offer specialty coffee with more aggressive advertisement at a lower cost. The competitive context changed for Starbucks because it’s focus in mass distribution channels and its retail footprint strategy stated its product within a standard performance product value; this affected the value perception of the product.

Service: The retail objectives of Starbucks in its annual report, emphasizes the needs to put customer first on the condition that each customer has a unique Starbucks experience, for example the baristas can occasionally rewards customer with their regular coffee, free of charge [8].