Starbucks makes some moves
The founder and CEO of Starbucks (Howard Schultz) realized that the organization was headed in the wrong direction. He recognized that the experience that made Starbucks the most popular coffee house in the U.S. was dwindling away.
About a year ago, I wrote about how Mr. Schultz had admitted that the original reasons why customers were coming into their coffee shops were now being ignored The company was slowly commercializing the coffee experience for their customers. Consumer Reports even indicated that McDonald's coffee was better than Starbucks.
In the last few months Mr. Schultz has taken some drastic steps to improve the experience for their loyal customers.
In a bold move on Tuesday February 26th 2008, Starbucks closed all 7,100 stores in the U.S. for a 3 hour training session on what each of the 135,000 associates must do to ensure a great experience for their customers. This is really unheard of in the retail and food services sectors. Mr. Schultz showed some real commitment by telling his Customers we need some time to make things better for you. Dunkin' Donuts took action by offering 99 cent coffees on the day Starbucks was closed.
Starbucks has also launched a quasi-social network website to garner feedback and ideas from their loyal Customer base. They estimated that they would get a few hundred responses in the few days after the launch of the new website. Within the first week they had over 100,000 votes and ideas on what Starbucks should do to improve the experience for their customers.
There are very few companies that have a leader that is comfortable to stand up and admit their failings. It is rare to see a company react with moves that are fairly unprecedented.
We'll have to wait and see whether Mr. Schultz can get his massive organization back on the track he feels they need to be.
Kudos to him and the entire organization for committing to a bold plan and staying the course.
