Dive Brief:
- Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks, wants the coffee chain’s executives to spend more time with frontline employees and rethink the mobile app strategy. “Focus on being experiential, not transactional,” Schultz wrote in a LinkedIn post Sunday.
- “The stores require a maniacal focus on the customer experience, through the eyes of a merchant,” Schultz said in the post. “The answer does not lie in data, but in the stores.”
- Starbucks’ performance fell short of expectations in its latest quarter, executives said on a Q2 2024 earnings call last week. The company is working to speed up service after reporting a "mid-teens percent" of mobile orders went uncompleted and customers abandoned mobile orders.
Dive Insight:
Starbucks’ road to recovery starts with improving its U.S. operations, Schultz said.
“It’s not the miss that matters,” Schultz wrote in the post. “It’s what comes next. What’s the diagnosis of the problem? What’s the impact on morale? And what’s the strategy to fix it?”
Schultz called on company executives to focus on the store experience and urged them to “spend more time with those who wear the green apron.”
Few understand the true customer experience like a barista, cashier or call center agent, according to Judy Weader, principal analyst at Forrester.
“They’re emotionally invested in things being better for the customer because when things aren’t going well for the customer, they’re always the ones bearing the brunt of it,” Weader told CX Dive in March.
The coffee company is working to offer more accurate order wait times and help customers find products based on their dietary needs, CEO Laxman Narasimhan said on a Q1 2024 earnings call in January.
Starbucks is also rolling out the Siren Craft System, a revamped drink-making process, to reduce mobile order wait times. The Siren Craft System is a simplified version of the Siren System, which launched in 2022 and includes investments in new machinery to further speed up beverage production.
The full Siren System will be in less than 10% of stores by the end of 2024, Narasimhan said during the Q2 2024 earnings call.
