Starbucks Case Study Write-Up

Starbucks Case Study Write-Up

        Starbucks has been known for their excellent customer service. Employees, or in this case partners, are trained to have hard skills and soft skills. They also have the “Just Say Yes” policy that enables them to provide the best service as possible. It means that even if customers spill a drink and they ask for a refill, they have to say yes and refill it for them. Therefore, I recommend Starbucks to not invest $40 million annually for additional 20 hours of labor a week at each store. This is because they already have good operating system. They don’t need additional labor hours to bring the service time down to three-minute level at all stores. The company had focused on “increasing barista efficiency by removing all nonvalue-added tasks, simplifying the beverage production process, and tinkering with the facility design to eliminate bottlenecks” (pg. 6). This efficient process already makes the partners work faster.

        In addition to that, according to Exhibit 7, the customer snapshot scores for the average wait time has already been decreasing from about 3.30 minutes in Q3 01 to 3.10 minutes in Q3 02. This implies that partners can be trained to deliver drinks to customers faster without having to have an additional 20 hours of labor per week. Furthermore, according to Exhibit 10, 83% of Starbucks’ customers rate a clean store as being highly important in creating customer satisfaction. The next important key attributes in creating customer satisfaction in order according to rankings are convenience, treatment as a valuable customer, friendly staff, etc. Having fast service isn’t even in the top five key attributes in creating customer satisfaction. From looking at Exhibit 11, 19% of customers’ responses to the survey shows that having friendlier and more attentive staff makes them feel more like a valued customer. Other factors such as having personal treatment, more knowledgeable staff, and better service accounts for 10% of the responses in improvements to service. The percentage of the responses for faster and more efficient service also accounts for 10% of the responses in improvements to service, which means that customers don’t really emphasize the importance of faster service that much.