Starbucks: Delivering Customer Service

Starbucks: Delivering Customer Service
The elusive goal of customer satisfaction has long provided companies with endless headaches and difficult decisions. In the end, associating specific customer satisfaction metrics to company profit and loss would provide the undeniable proof needed to make changes, and then invest the required capital to address any concerns. Starbucks, not unlike the rest of the business world, has found itself in the same situation. At a basic level, the argument that more investment in customer service creates higher customer satisfaction has already been fundamentally agreed upon. However, more specifically, Starbucks must decide if a reinvestment of $40M annually in …show more content…

Starbucks is known to be one of the world’s most effective marketing organizations, but they lacked a strategic marketing group. The company had no chief marketing office and the marketing that was in place functioned in three groups: a market research team, a category group, and a marketing group. Starbucks newly created the role of chief marketing officer in 2009. Starbucks’ brand meaning has been recognized as good coffee on the run everywhere. With Starbucks comes convenience and consistency to its consumers on the go. Between 2001 and 2002 the market research team discovered that Starbucks’ brand image was targeted more to making money and building stores. It became apparent that the company had to regroup and cater more value to its customers. Starbucks’ consumer base was evolving and the newer customers tended to be younger, less well-educated, and in a lower income bracket than Starbucks’ more established customers.
Later, in December 2009, Starbucks launched a loyalty card program called My Starbucks Rewards that offered customers cheaper drinks and was targeted for the chain’s most frequent visitors, who come to Starbucks an average of 16 times a month. The program consisted of three reward levels: * The Welcome Level: Received a free birthday beverage when your card is initially registered. * The Green Level: After using the card five times customers