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Starbucks: Delivering Customer Service

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Starbucks: Delivering Customer Service Starbucks is dominant coffee brand in North America, which also is well-known worldwide. Established in 1971 as coffee shop oriented to a niche of coffee purists, in late 1980’s it turned to be a constantly growing chain of stores that sold whole-beans and premium-priced coffee to mostly affluent, well-educated customers. In years 1992-2002 company was showing at least 5% annual growth. And by 2002 Starbucks was serving already 20M customers in 5886 stores (both operated and licensed) around the globe, had $3.3 billion net revenues and was opening 3 new stores a day in average. Case issue: Despite the consecutive sales growth most recent market research had revealed that the company is not meeting …show more content…

With coffee consumption being transformed into a habit, with active market growth, with Starbucks being a North America market leader the distance between company and its competitors was reduced. We believe such a dramatic growth have led to current customers’ dissatisfaction. That’s also the reason why brand image have had some rough edges and why the historical customer profile had expanded and Starbucks’ newer customers tended to be younger, less well-educated and lower-income ($65000 in average) and less loyal (according to exhibit 8). These changes aren 't fatal because the company is still growing in aggressive manner, but in our opinion this trend may lead to future losses, because lesser loyalty and decreased image may sign that brand has no clear strategy and clear target audience. Starbucks brand has few "traditional" components of uniqueness: offering highest-quality coffee, customer recognition and drinks customization. It could not remain upscale brand when being "fast". Working fast leaves no opportunity for recognizing customer and customizing her drinks: or you are Fastbeverage, cheap like McDonalds is, or you are offering to a client premium-segment coffee and “customer intimacy”. without these components there is risk for the brand of loosing all its "original" loyal customers (which currently make 62% of all Starbucks transactions). Customer Satisfaction

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