MSI homepage Dec., 2009
Has My Starbucks Idea been a winning innovation for Starbucks? Is it effective?
On Wednesday, March 19, 2008, at the annual shareholder meeting, Starbucks launched a customer-suggestion site called “My Starbucks Idea“. This blog post is a discussion and review of mystarbucksidea.com since its inception. In the nearly two years of the site, it has been through a number of changes. For example, when the site was brand new, there was no way to subscribe to a thread. About a year after the site was born, the ability to add a thread as a “favorite” was added. Unfortunately, if you subscribe to too many, you tilt the system. I have 539 threads listed as “favorites” and I haven’t been able to access them in months – when I click on favorites, it loops me back to the home page. Though I keep adding new favorites, as if one day it will work again!
When the site was new, lots of in-store signage helped promote the site, as well as a floating icon on starbucks.com which said something like, “Got an Idea?” and then if you clicked it, it took you to mystarbucksidea.com. The floating icon lasted for about six months, as I recall, and even sometimes prompted people to start threads complaining about it. This was in many ways the best era of MSI, in my opinion. The driver for many people to come to MSI was that icon, and once Starbucks removed it from the homepage starbucks.com. site traffic seemed to slow down. Now, in November 2009, MSI seems like a far quieter community than what it once was in 2008. It’s never really picked back up to that 2008 level.
In March 2008, when mystarbucksidea.com was new, I had no idea that I would be writing a blog 15 months later, and so unfortunately I wasn’t making any screen captures or somehow otherwise memorializing the important changes and discussions at MSI. As a result this blog post will just be a ramble of my observations from being a participant in MSI from its very beginning with almost no nice screen caps to illustrate my story.
Let’s start at the very beginning of the story: The day that MSI was born to the public. On the morning of the annual shareholders’ meeting, friendly Starbucks partners passed around cards to the meeting attendees. They were cards about 3 x 5 in size (roughly), and basically asked you what’s your idea for Starbucks. The cards were collected, and we shuffled into the meeting. Howard Schultz announced a “transformation agenda” for Starbucks which included mystarbucksidea.com and describing it as follows in a press release: “Starbucks first online community, that takes the Starbucks Experience outside the store and enables customers to play a role in shaping the company’s future.” That day at the meeting, Chris Bruzzo, Chief Technology Guy (I’m not totally clear on his exact title), got on the stage and demonstrated on a large screen the new cool site mystarbucksidea.com. It had been pre-loaded with customer ideas, and pre-loaded with ideas that came from the cards filled out that day at the meeting. The earliest idea threads all said, “custidea” or something close to that because they were not started by individuals with profiles.
Early on, the site only had the ability to have “up votes” and a person could not vote down a thread. I have heard it said that Chris Bruzzo firmly believed that it was important not to have down-votes, and only up votes, but then in response to the many people who came to the site wanting down votes, MSI gave in. By late 2008, the site had the ability to vote down. It would be important to note that this created a strange dynamic that threads that existed before negative voting (and still to this day this is true) always had much higher point totals than threads created after the advent of down votes. A person may only vote once a thread, up or down, and then either adding 10 points to the thread or subtracting 10 points to it.
So what have we seen from mystarbucksidea.com and what is the upshot? Overall, in my humble opinion, sadly, I think there are more “cons” than “pros” with the site. It pains me to say that, because I enjoy participating on it.
Here is the downside to MSI: (In no particular order)
* Well an obvious problem is that it is an open slate for anyone to write anything about Starbucks. This means that if Starbucks, or high profile Starbucks figures make the news due to jet planes, Sonics, or store closings, there is sometimes a wave of new threads of people trashing Starbucks for the hot topic of the moment. When you give your customers a wide open empty page to write on, controlling it becomes difficult.
* It seems that many people have little interest in the merits of the conversation. People would rather listen to how it is said, than what is being said. Customers who complain about their pet issue, and threaten to leave Starbucks, are met with negative votes. The down votes come from the angry tone of the post. Since many partners (and other customers as well) cannot get past how the message is being said, the result is that people are overlooking often an area where there is genuinely room for improvement in the business.
There are so many of these kinds of threads, it is hard to mention them all! It’s a shame because many baristas respond with similar tone, happy to let the customer go to a competitor. Of course all those customers add up, and they mean something to the changing character of the business, the demographics of the customer base, and even the brand image. No matter how angry an MSI thread appears, it shouldn’t be treated by Starbucks partners or other customers as, “well, he’s just a complainer” attitude.
* Point totals mean very little. Great ideas get down votes. Some ideas have very high points because they’ve lived on the site forever, long before down votes existed. At times, I think people vote ideas down because people are simply tired of hearing about them, not because there is no merit to them.
* The duplication of ideas causes problems about how meaningful any information on the site is. As previously mentioned, meritorious threads sometimes receive down votes simply because people are tired of hearing about them. The moderators attempt to merge threads, which I applaud them for, but this requires a subjective judgment call at times. Is a thread that says, “Please recycle and compost” the same as a thread that says “Why can’t a put my glass bottle in a recycle bin?”
* The area of the site with the most valuable information receives the least amount of visitor traffic. The Ideas in Action area of the site is woefully neglected by visitors. When a person signs in to the site, he or she is directed to area of popular ideas. Of course, this is not the most factually useful area of the site. Ideas in Action has content on everything from Shared Planet, Coffee options, new products, new store design, to Vivannos.
The unfortunate result is that most people happily create new threads, over and over again, on topics that have previously been thoroughly discussed in the Ideas in Action area of the site. I have sometimes thought that there are very few novel ideas that have not been touched upon in Ideas in Action. I wonder if Starbucks could just eliminate “new ideas” and the entire “ideas” area of the site in favor of structured conversation in the blogs.
* The structure of mystarbucksidea.com can actually make customers feel less heard than if there were no MSI at all. Unfortunately, for some repetitive ideas, when looking at moderator responses, it appears over and over again like as if mods are say, “we’re working on it.” After a while, from the customer perspective, it simply appears like no answer at all. In the end, it leaves the customer or participant the feeling of talking to a brick wall.
* The use of mystarbucksidea.com can blur with the purpose of Customer Relations: Customers come on the site repeatedly to make store specific complaints, only to have moderators tell them that MSI is geared towards finding universal ideas, and not store specific ideas. Of course then to the customer who doesn’t understand what MSI is, he or she feels like she has to complain twice, and doesn’t understand why the corporation can’t take a complaint from the MSI part of their website.
* Starbucks store-level partner participation can great poor customer relations: It is unfortunate, but sometimes a customer will have a complaint about something, and the comment response will be an angry barista type response. The “Starbucks experience” is continued from the store, to the online site, and the customer comes to MSI still expecting to receive welcoming, kind, reassuring words. It is not like the image of Starbucks ends with store experiences only, and that MSI is some distinct entity. Rather, the green siren is proudly displayed on the site, and the psyche of the customer is geared towards have a continuation of the great customer service and legendary experience for which Starbucks is famed. Once in a while, baristas post hot-headed comments which reflect poorly on the image of Starbucks.
This can work both ways. Sometimes store partners post helpful and knowledgeable answers to threads.
Some of the positive aspects of mystarbucksidea.com are as follows:
* The site can be highly entertaining. Actually this is one of several reasons I keep coming back to the site. I have to just laugh at times at the ideas that are posted. Take a look at this sampling of ideas:
Catchy name for a bigger size (a customer wants a 40 ounce latte!!)
Star Wars theme day (a customer somehow thinks baristas should dress as Star Wars characters on a given day)
Some people want (a paragraph run on sentence of what people talk about at MSI)
Kissing Booth (customer wants to kiss girls at Starbucks)
Build a Starbucks theme park and rollercoaster (appears to be a serious plea for a Starbucks roller coaster)
* The site is an amazing opportunity to create a community of customers and partners in vibrant discussion. This is a critical part of the site. I admit, I log in to mystarbucksidea and wonder what CranBliss, Pechipy, BetterBefore, Chicagobrocks, and many others have posted. I look forward to comments in orange, because the moderators give the place a lot of warmth, even when they have no good answers to hard questions.
Mystarbucksidea.com is fundamentally a community. It allows people to talk about what is happening around the world at Starbucks and compare and contrast experiences. Sometimes people who leave mystarbucksidea.com are sorely missed by the regulars. I enjoyed getting to know “Breve” on mystarbucksidea.com, and I wish that Momiji would come back and post again too.
Certain moderators are missing. Though I know that sbux_nric is now at another part of Starbucks, I miss her comments. And I don’t know where sbux_mguiste has gone, but I want him to post again too. He just disappeared, which never really feels good. If Cecile, Brendan, and Sally stopped posting, I’d think there had been an upheaval at the Starbucks headquarters.
* There is a wealth of information in the site: If you are one who is clicking on the links found in my blogs, you’ll find that many posts have some link back to the Ideas in Action area of MSI. If I am referencing the Vivanno, I might link back to the original Vivanno launch entry in Ideas in Action. There is simply a wealth of information about everything from store design to products to Shared Planet, all in Ideas in Action.
What might be done to improve the site?
* Eliminate the ability to so easily create a new thread. I realize this is antithetical to the site’s purpose, but until there is some control over the million duplicate threads, the site will always be lacking in meaning. This may mean that really, Starbucks should just offer a blog. Whether it is a blog framed like starbucksmelody.com or other popular blogs, there should be a lot more control over ideas.
* Eliminate down votes: Perhaps Chris Bruzzo was right all along. Customers don’t like to see their ideas receive hundreds of negative points, and it discourages future participation when a person starts a thread, and it is met with huge negative points.
* Enhance profile capacity: Since the site is a place where people can connect with each other, a basic private messaging system might be useful.
* Add some formatting to the comments. Having long block comments with no ability to make a new paragraph, bold, or underline, thwarts effective use of the comments.
*Drive more traffic to it: There is no way to get a representative sample of customers on any topic, if the traffic is too small.
I could probably write more about mystarbucksidea.com, but this blog entry is getting quite long. I turn it over to my readers now. What do you think of mystarbucksidea.com?
About 14 months ago, Starbucks launched a program called a Gold Card. Under the 2008-2009 version of the Gold Card, officially announced in October, and available for customers to purchase as of November 4, 2008, customers paid $25.00 annual fee to receive ten-percent off all their purchases for the year. Click here for the official Starbucks press release about the 2008 version of the Gold Card. Additionally, customers received various coupons in the mail, available only to Gold Card holders. This was a fabulous program for the highly loyal customer buying multiple items at a time, and frequenting Starbucks perhaps a dozen a more times in one month. For the infrequent customer who came in, bought a soy latte, once in a week, this offer made no sense. Unfortunately, only about 20% of the Starbucks customer base falls under the “super regular” category, though they spend in numbers far in excess of their 20 percent proportion of total customers.
Commentary: Starbucks Brew On Demand – The experience in the stores.
by Melody on February 6, 2010
{ 34 comments }
This blog entry is my commentary about the experience created by Starbucks‘ “brew on demand” policy. This blog entry mostly focuses on the experience at the register – the few short minutes between customer and barista while standing at the register. It is not really a discussion of the underlying merits of “brew on demand”, but rather I truly want to focus on the customer’s experience of it. Unfortunately, mostly this will be a critical discussion of “brew on demand”. For a background story to “Brew on Demand” take a look at a previous blog entry here:
First, some background on what “Brew on Demand” is, for those who do not know. On April 8, 2008, Starbucks launched a new coffee blend, an everyday coffee brew, called “Pike Place Roast” replacing the decades long tradition of offering a variety of coffees to showcase their whole bean offerings. This means that rather being able to have a variety of coffee offerings, after April 8th would always be guaranteed only one coffee would on the brew and ready to go: Pike Place Roast.
There are numerous sort of obvious problems or challenges with a premier coffeehouse, specializing in a variety of beans, offering just one coffee bean selection for in-store consumption. Just to name a few obvious problems: If the customer doesn’t like Pike Place Roast, he or she suddenly can’t get a cup of coffee. Another problem is that even customers who genuinely like Pike Place Roast may get tired of drinking only one coffee variety. And yet another problem is that it suddenly becomes much more difficult to get customers enthusiastic about premier whole bean coffee if there is no opportunity to try other coffee offerings. And the customer who knows and understands that there are many different brew methods for coffee, will very well be unhappy to have to accept an alternate brew-method for his or her cup of coffee. Lastly, generally speaking, many customers will be unhappy at the idea that they’ve arrived a specialty coffeehouse only to be told to accept a substitution (have an Americano instead). Many customers do not want to drink watered down espresso, but rather want to enjoy a cup of Sumatra, or Kenya, or the blends that made Starbucks famous throughout the long history of 1971 through 2008.
In response to the challenges associated with only offering one single coffee offering, Starbucks announced a policy of “brew on demand”. In June 2008, Starbucks officially announced that baristas will “Brew on Demand“. By March of 2009, there were still complaints that Brew on Demand wasn’t effective, and Starbucks reiterated the same “Brew on Demand” policy again in their blogs, this time with even stronger wording:
• Decaf Pike Place Roast™ and Today’s Morning Pick should be continually brewed until 12 p.m. in all stores. (from 5 a.m. until 12 p.m. in 24-hour stores)
• After 12 p.m., stores should consider their customers’ preferences to judge whether they continue to brew batches of these coffees or brew when ordered.
• When a customer requests Decaf or Today’s Morning Pick and the store does not have it brewed, your barista should offer to brew a fresh batch while acknowledging the wait time.
Several obvious key points in the above language: Brew on Demand should work the same whether the customer wants the Bold Pick coffee or whether the customer wants a Decaf brew. The analysis is the same for both coffee varieties. Also, the intimation is that the experience should be easy at the register…the barista should “offer” to brew coffee.
What does brew on demand translate into at the store level?
So what happens at the register when a customer tries to order another coffee other than Pike Place Roast, which is not already on the brew? Fundamentally, a Starbucks customer is met with incredible inconsistency in the experience. There is no assurances of any one particular result, and unlike the latte drinker who can demand a drink be remade if it is not “perfect” the coffee drinker cannot demand anything. There are a limited number of scenarios. Basically, the customer will experience one of the following, depending on the barista’s good nature or animosity towards brew on demand:
The bottom line is that “Brew on Demand” creates incredible inconsistency in the experience. There is no way that a customer can demand coffee. The customer is placed in this horribly awkward position of trying to come up with the right words to persuade the barista to brew coffee. It feels like begging for coffee and most often a power game. It’s an awful experience. I have tried every possible way to get coffee. I have experimented with this and intentionally done everything from being extremely sweet to down right demanding, and I can assure you dear readers, nothing works. Either the barista will brew you coffee or not, and the customer has no control over what happens. All the customer can do is order coffee and say, “Hi! I’d like a tall bold pick of the week coffee” and then hold on tight and hope for the best, not knowing which of the above outcomes will happen. This incredibly uncertainty in the experience cannot be good for the brand. I have experienced everyone of the above listed possible results.
Some readers may ask, “Melody, why are you still a Starbucks customer despite that only Pike Place Roast is available after noon in the stores?”
Pike Place Roast was launched April 8, 2008, and the worst of the brew on demand experiences, for me, were 2008, and into very early 2009. For me, the experience began to slowly change in August 2008. In August 2008, Starbucks completed the first wave of Clover expansion, and suddenly I found my work location perfectly and evenly distanced from two Clover brewers. By late 2008, at least Monday through Friday during normal business hours, I didn’t really worry about brew on demand. I simply did not make an afternoon visit Starbucks unless I was going to a store with a Clover brewer.
In honesty, it took a long time for me to figure out which Starbucks (outside of downtown Seattle) will brew on demand, and which will refuse. After a while, I slowly created a very tiny mental list of only three Starbucks north of the ship canal that consistently brew on demand. Still to this day, I rarely go in a Starbucks in the weekends any more that isn’t one of these three locations. In July 2009, Starbucks opened up 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea, which uses both the ‘pour over’ and Clover brew methods for coffee, and basically I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I have to thank @Brendan206 who tipped me off at the one location in Seattle (north of the ship canal) that always brews bold, open to close. It’s wonderful. I go out of my way to go to this store on weekends. To all of you readers, this may seem ridiculous but finding one Starbucks brewing bold in Seattle is like looking for a needle in a haystack given the huge number of Starbucks this city has. Now, between 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea, and one particular Starbucks that always brews bold, I always have a weekend coffeehouse for bold Starbucks coffee. And truthfully, if the weather is nice and warm, I’ll often get a cold drink anyway.
My problem is simply that if I leave this Seattle-bubble, I’m pretty lost and basically now expect that I will hear “no” for answer, or that a barista will spend longer trying to persuade me that an Americano and/or a French Press is the same thing as filter-brewed coffee than it would take to actually brew it. The result: I don’t go to a normal Starbucks in the afternoon.
Even today, on MyStarbucksIdea, there are still people who come on to the site complaining that their local stores told them that ‘they’re not allowed to brew bold in the afternoon’. That’s not a true statement per the Starbucks policy clearly announced by Starbucks to customers but it still is happening.
At this point, I question whether anything *can* ever change. Twenty months of being a specialty coffeehouse featuring just one single coffee has certainly caused some shifting and transition in the customer base. No doubt, there is a self-selection of customers happening, where bold brew customers simply don’t return, to be replaced by customers who like something else.
Where is all this going?
It’s not going anywhere. There is not enough coffee education in the stores these days for most baristas to get excited by Italian Roast or explain why it has sweet notes to it, or to explain why Sidamo pairs well with a lemon loaf. Many modern baristas believe, “have an Americano, it’s the same thing.” The brew method IS important. Drip-brewed Espresso Roast is not the same thing as a shot of espresso. And frankly, I would be happy if a barista said to me, “if you’ve got five minutes to wait, I can brew a quarter-batch of Espresso Roast.” It makes a fine drip coffee.
However, as I’ve said before, I don’t think anything will change now because the status quo has gone on so long. I will say my favorite store manager has told me many times, “Melody, Starbucks should rename it ‘Brew by Request’ because even the harsh tone of the policy sets the customer-barista off on the wrong foot. Request is a much nice word than ‘demand‘”. I agree.
I try very hard to keep this blog positive. I don’t just repeat the latest lawsuit/scandal story in the news about Starbucks and report here. Rather I create my own content, through the Starbucks lens as I see it, as very imperfect as that might be. It would be really disingenuous of me if I never admitted that Starbucks had a few policies that get underneath my skin. I have to be honest. This is one of them here. But we will return to your happier Starbucks content soon!
If you like this blog entry, you may also like the following:
And now, your thoughts on “Brew on Demand”…