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From Replicable and Consistent to Magical and Unique

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Men are rich only as they give. He who gives great service gets great rewards.

ELBERT HUBBARD

While passion for coffee has been and continues to be essential to Starbucks, leaders like Howard Schultz emphasize that human experiences are at the heart of the brand. For example, Howard notes, “Starbucks is at its best when we are creating enduring relationships and personal connections.” Building on that theme in 2008, while strategizing how to mount a resurgence for Starbucks, Howard communicated to partners that the “Transformation Agenda includes … re-igniting our emotional attachment with our customers by restoring the connection our customers have with you, our coffee, our brand, and our stores. Unlike many other places that sell coffee, Starbucks built the equity of our brand through the Starbucks Experience. It comes to life every day in the relationship our people have with our customers. By focusing again on the Starbucks Experience, we will create a renewed level of meaningful differentiation and separation in the market between us and others who are attempting to sell coffee.” People can copy your products and your services, but seldom can another business effectively or consistently execute a differentiated experiential offering—this is equally as true for a visit to an Apple Store as it is for a visit to Starbucks.

So, how does a company like Starbucks take a product that can easily be commoditized and offer it in a way that produces differentiation anchored to enduring relationships and personal connections? This chapter unpacks multifaceted aspects of Starbucks customer experience excellence, including how Starbucks leaders:

Define and communicate the desired and unique Starbucks Experience.

Select individuals with the requisite talent to deliver that experience consistently.

Train partners on the key pillars necessary to engage customers routinely.

More important, this chapter allows you to see the strategic and tactical customer experience–based efforts deployed by Starbucks, so that you can consider how those approaches fit with the challenges and opportunities that you face.

WHAT EXPERIENCE DO YOU WANT CUSTOMERS TO HAVE?

American personal development pioneer Earl Nightingale observed, “Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or ideal.” As was the case with product passion, the worthy customer experience ideals at Starbucks are expressed in the company’s mission statement (to inspire and nurture the human spirit—one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time) and are supported by the principles of how this mission is lived every day, including:

Our Customers

When we are fully engaged, we connect with, laugh with, and uplift the lives of our customers—even if just for a few moments. Sure, it starts with the promise of a perfectly made beverage, but our work goes far beyond that. It’s really about human connection.

Our Stores

When our customers feel this sense of belonging, our stores become a haven, a break from the worries outside, a place where you can meet with friends. It’s about enjoyment at the speed of life—sometimes slow and savored, sometimes faster. Always full of humanity.

That’s brief and clear—leaders like those at Starbucks put customers, products, and experiences at the purposeful center of their businesses.

LOOKING FOR EXPERIENCE CREATORS

By using words like inspire, nurture, and uplift, Starbucks leadership defines the Starbucks Experience as being much more than the accurate and efficient service of high-quality beverages. Partners should aspire to deliver moments, products, and environments that elevate and transform those who are served. Human connection is the magic at the core of the Starbucks brand. In order to make the magic happen, Starbucks looks for prospective partners who are authentically and consistently interested in others. That interest can cut through the chaos and unpredictability in the lives of customers, thus producing reliable and positive experiences at your business. Consumer data, consistently reflected in studies such as the American Express Global Customer Service Barometer, validate the perspective that customer service is chaotic, unpredictable, and in decline. But how does an organization select individuals who have an interest in “authentically and consistently” serving others?

Charles Douglas III, a paralegal at Starbucks, believes that the key element in selection is observing and interviewing for enthusiasm and service talent. In fact, he believes he was selected for his first job at Starbucks (as a barista) based largely on those factors. According to Charles, “I was looking for a place that closely aligned with my personal values and a place I would be proud to say that I worked.” Charles reviewed the company’s guiding principles and felt they were credibly reflected in the experiences he had as a customer. Charles then reports that he put on a dress shirt and green tie and “with a smile on my face, ran up to a store manager as she was opening her store at 4 in the morning. I noticed that she was scared, but I did my best to say, ‘I am here because I really want this job, and I bet you I want it more than anybody else.’” Charles goes on to note, “Starbucks store managers are really good at hiring based on enthusiasm, your sense of purpose for serving others, and a willingness to learn. We really look for those people who are willing to live by what the company holds most important, and we will train them from there.” Résumés, past work history, and even favorable recommendations notwithstanding, there is something to be said for observing and interacting with prospects to determine whether they are eager, teachable, and authentically interested in others.

GUIDING EXPERIENCE DELIVERY

Many businesses orient new hires by teaching them the tasks to be performed on the job but fail to educate them on service excellence skills and/or the experience that they want those employees to consistently deliver. At Starbucks, however, initial training dives quickly into courses like “Customer Service Basics” and the “Starbucks Experience.”

During these training sessions, new hires are provided guidance on what “customer experience” means at Starbucks, and they are placed in positions where they can observe the service experience from the customer’s perspective. For example, newly hired baristas are exposed to a process tool called the “Store Walk Thru,” where they move through the café environment observing and recording salient aspects that a customer is likely to encounter as she journeys from her arrival through her departure. Starbucks leadership sets the expectation that after initial training, the new hire will be a part of these customer-perspective walks, which occur once per shift at each store. Like all tools of this nature, store managers must constantly reinforce the importance and value of taking the customer’s perspective and ensure that this process does not become a perfunctory and routine task.

In addition to this customer empathy tool (Store Walk Thru), initial customer service and desired experience training help new hires reflect on their personal history of consumer experiences (inside or outside of Starbucks) to identify what makes an experience memorable, uplifting, inspiring, or elevated for them. The training hones in on the concept of “branded” experiences and how customers need to be assured that all encounters that they have with a brand will deliver consistent products, processes, and engaging experience elements. Execution on the branded/consistency dimension is reflected in comments from customers like Jenny, who notes, “When I travel, I try to spot a Starbucks. It feels like you are connecting with a little bit of home wherever you are in the world…. It carries a set of expectations for products, feelings, and the way you are treated.” Even if a business operates from a single location, the issue is the same: Will I have a comparable experience the next time I visit? Will the expectations set today be matched or exceeded tomorrow? Or will I have a random, unreliable collection of encounters that erode the concept of the brand?

To deliver consistent experiences at Starbucks, the leadership offers a defined service vision that describes what needs to be achieved during service experiences. Additionally, it provides four customer service behaviors that help partners understand how the customer service vision is to be accomplished. The Starbucks customer vision statement reads: “We create inspired moments in each customer’s day.” To accomplish this objective, partners are encouraged to focus on the following customer service behaviors:

Anticipate

Connect

Personalize

Own

In essence, the leadership offers partners the desired service experience outcome (“inspired moments”) and the key actions needed to deliver it. For example, if a barista reads the customer’s need state, the barista can anticipate, connect, personalize, and own that customer’s experience to create an inspired moment for him. To be more specific, if a customer looks rushed, the barista can anticipate and take responsibility for delivering an accurate and expedited beverage with a brief but personal moment of connection (something as simple as a genuine smile). By contrast, if a customer is a regular who enjoys conversation, the partner can make a connection by remembering his drink or calling him by name and taking responsibility for personalizing the drink or conversation in a way that produces meaningful, if not inspired, moments in his day.

Customers often share the joy they experience when baristas execute the Starbucks service vision. Alli Higgins, a 10-year Starbucks customer, notes, “Baristas remember my drink and my name. It’s amazing, since it usually takes only one or two times and they already know my name. That stands out in a world where you don’t see much of that care or thoughtfulness. Baristas also remember when I take a trip and ask me about it. Because of the way I am treated at Starbucks, I’ll occasionally bake cookies for them. Now they’ll jokingly say, ‘Hey, Alli, where’s our cookies?’ That’s the kind of thing I want to do because I consider them part of my family.” By providing the desired destination and ways to arrive there, you help your teams develop exceptionally strong bonds with customers (in Alli’s words, “I consider them part of my family”) that powerfully differentiate your company from the competition.

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REFLECTION ON CONNECTION

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1. If asked, what percentage of your employees could articulate your customer experience vision or the way you want customers to feel as a result of the experiences they have with your brand? What would you hope to hear?

2. Do you provide tools like the “Store Walk Thru” to help your staff empathize with customers and adopt their perspective?

3. Have you outlined key behaviors such as anticipate, connect, personalize, and own which will help your team members understand how to deliver your desired experience?

CREATING THE ENVIRONMENT—KEEPING IT CLEAN AND LEAN

So you sell excellent products, you’ve ignited product passion throughout your organization, and your staff authentically and consistently delivers your branded experience. You have mastered the customer experience challenge, right? Not exactly. To be on the same trajectory as world-class service providers like those I write about (Starbucks, Zappos, or The Ritz-Carlton), you need to possess at least three additional competencies: (1) the ability to maximize customer engagement through environmental design, (2) integration of key sensory factors, and (3) a capacity to listen and adapt your offerings to meet the changing wants, needs, and desires of your customers.

In the late 1990s, business theorists and economists like B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore started to suggest that we were entering an age in which “memorable experiences” served as key drivers for economic growth. Rather than simply focusing on the benefits and attributes of products or the financial advantages of efficient service delivery, these pioneers initiated discussion about the benefits accrued from scripting sensory-rich experiences upon the “stage” of a business. Borrowing themes from the world of live theater, they offered guidance on how to remove negative and align positive cues in order to build experiences that not only engage customers but “transform” them. While theatrical metaphors for customer experience design can be problematic when they refer to “staging” and “scripting” (which imply inauthenticity or robotic transactions), these references allude to the importance of sensory elements and to the attention that is needed to build the right environment or platform on which service experiences are cast.

In a variation of Shakespeare’s immortal line delivered by Jacques in As You Like It—“All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players”—all business settings are a stage from which all experiences emerge. At Starbucks, the design of the stage (the store environment) and the sensory elements placed on that stage are carefully considered to heighten the customer experience.

Starbucks leaders understand that the design of extraordinary experiences involves a willingness to see the environment from the customers’ perspective and to attend to the need states of core customer segments. While many leaders look for ways to improve experiences by adding elements to the environment, the best outcomes often come from the removal of negative cues that detract from a memorable experience. Howard Schultz, for example, removed breakfast food items from Starbucks stores until he could be assured that any negative smells of food preparation (charred bread or burnt cheese) did not intrude upon a key sensory element in the coffee shop—the smell of coffee. This battle involved the leadership’s willingness to forgo revenue from breakfast food sales until preparation technologies could be developed to abate unwanted food aromas. Similarly, decisions by Starbucks leadership to reduce non-coffee-related merchandise (like the stuffed animals referred to in the previous chapter), even if that merchandise contributed to positive margins, reflect a commitment to the elimination of cues that compromise an ideal experience. In the end, great customer experiences depend on both the addition and the removal of emotional stimuli and environmental design elements.

Lest you think that “stage” design considerations relate only to brick-and-mortar storefronts, every contact point between your customer and your business serves as an opportunity to engage customers through thoughtful presentation. For example, Mike Peck, creative director, Packaging, Starbucks Global Creative Studio, who led the team responsible for the redesign of the Starbucks iconic logo, saw opportunities to enhance the customer experience and modernize the brand through the newly updated mark.

The original 1971 Starbucks logo had the words “Starbucks Coffee and Tea” encircling the siren (the mythical character at the center of the logo that is often confused with a mermaid). The revised logos of 1987 and 1992 dropped the word tea, but still had the siren bound by the words Starbucks and Coffee.

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Starbucks logo introduced in 1992.

According to Mike, “Although not a core reason for the update to the icon, the words on the logo actually created confusion in the customer experience. For example, we had Starbucks ice cream flavors like vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry, none of which have coffee in them.” With the existing logo, people who glanced at those particular ice cream containers might assume coffee was an ingredient. Mike shares, “Putting a big stamp on the container that says ‘coffee free’ is a rather inelegant solution. You want your design to be as clean and pure as possible. Consumers, when they looked at it, just saw coffee and strawberries, not an optimal taste combination. We have other beverages domestically and internationally that are not coffee-based, yet they would have the word coffee affixed to them by virtue of the logo. Ultimately our redesign opened up the siren, let her be the hero, broke down some barriers, and even streamlined the customer experience.” Looking across all your contact points with your company, from its logo to its product return policies, where can you clean up your clutter and confusion?

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Starbucks logo introduced in 2011.

Since eliminating clutter and increasing clarity improve customer experiences, Starbucks has entered a “Lean” transformation process, focusing on a shift from traditional efforts toward enhancing value to an approach based on a discipline modified from pure manufacturing settings to minimize waste and increase customer value.

During this transformation period, Starbucks leaders have had individuals at all levels of the organization comprehensively look at processes to identify issues and streamline their efficiency. Troy Alstead, chief financial officer and chief administrative officer, states, “As good as we were about spontaneity at forging human connections, we weren’t as good at removing waste and creating processes that maximized efficiency and customer value while making it easier for partners to serve our customers. Over the recent past we have made great strides in these areas of discipline. So the idea now is to remove the things that really aren’t critical to customer value. We shouldn’t be putting our partners in positions of having to be creative with processes. Let’s leverage their best practices that maximize efficiency for the partner and for the customer. Our partners should be encouraged to bring every bit of their creativity to how they interact with our customers, but quality and execution ultimately should be designed and measured by the benefit it brings to partners, customers, and our business.” Inherent in Starbucks approach to reduce inefficiencies is the understanding that to be truly effective, those reductions should produce routines that free up people or resources to make stronger interpersonal connections.

Unlike many other businesses that deploy Lean strategies, Starbucks takes a frontline empowerment approach to achieve its objectives. John Shook, a former executive at Toyota (the company from which much of Lean manufacturing practice emerged) and a past advisor to Starbucks, compares the strategy taken to increase efficiency at Starbucks with the methodologies used by McDonald’s: “McDonald’s very business model seeks a highly cookie-cutter approach. Therefore, McDonald’s may be successful in implementing traditional Industrial Engineering (Taylorism and all that—not lean) in a very traditional, top-down, programmatic way.”

By contrast, John suggests, “Starbucks decided long ago—and reconfirms this every day—that a cookie-cutter store approach is not the pathway to success for their product, which is a higher-end, higher-priced coffee that emphasizes the customer’s experience…. Each Starbucks store is different. The footprint is different, the customer experience is different. I believe Starbucks wants the customer experience from store to store to be consistent but unique. McDonald’s wants the customer experience to be exactly the same, totally common from store to store.”

Given that the drink and syrup combinations at Starbucks allow for more than 80,000 different beverages to be ordered by any given customer, John suggests that at Starbucks, “The goal is to make as many things as possible routine so that the barista can spend just a few more seconds talking with the customer…. No workarounds due to the line backing up, no shortcuts to get caught up—handling each unique order as it should be handled, in stride, without burden, and to the customer’s satisfaction.” If you are looking to create consistent but unique experiences, Starbucks approach to Lean serves as a template. Develop expertise in Lean-type strategies and engage a dialogue with and informative observation of those who perform important operational tasks. Those conversations and observations will readily enable you to create effective routines and efficiencies. Ultimately, this effort should result in more time for your people to create personally engaging experiences.

ADDING, ERRING, AND PERSISTING

When it comes to the customer experience, quite often enhancements take the form of trial-and-error adjustments in an attempt to hit upon the right ingredients in the right quantities necessary to deliver an optimal customer experience. Frequently, key elements are sensory in nature, such as music. Author and journalist Nick Chiles notes, “For companies looking to make an emotional connection with consumers, music continues to be one of the most reliable devices in the marketer’s toolbelt…. Take the case of Starbucks, which endeavored to turn its coffee shops into a fully experiential adult playground that tickled and stroked every one of the customers’ senses while they were in the café, making them want to stick around all day. A big part of that was music—interesting, off-beat, quirky musical finds that thrilled customers with a feeling that they had made a new discovery.”

Because customers became so connected with the music that Starbucks played in the stores and the discovery moments associated with that music, Starbucks began selling compilation and compact discs of featured artists.

What role do sensory elements play for your business? What do your customers hear at key touch points in their journey with you? Are there opportunities to incorporate sensory elements (auditory, olfactory, visual, or tactile) that will authentically enhance the customer’s experience?

KEEPING IT CORE AND EVOLVING

As we’ve explored previously, extraordinary customer experiences rely on processes of simplification and a willingness to experiment with sensory enrichment. The path to excellence also requires an ability to merge design elements in a brand-congruent fashion. Arthur Rubinfeld, chief creative officer for Starbucks and president, Global Innovation and Evolution Fresh Retail, notes, “As an architect, I believe that everyone can have an impression and an opinion on how to create a coffeehouse experience. The key, however, is to support the brand’s position seamlessly in the physical design. The most difficult part of retail store design is connecting the gestalt of the company, the mission of the company, the culture of the company to the physical solution. I’ve often said that in judging a store design, if you were to remove the logo discs and the signs from the fascia of the storefront tonight, would people shopping in that retail space tomorrow know that it was a Starbucks store?”

Throughout the 1990s Starbucks certainly seemed to be mixing the right ingredients to deliver coffeehouse experiences that contributed to the brand’s meteoric growth. Because they serve the ever-changing needs of people, physical spaces can’t remain static. In addition to sharing the importance of environmental factors in store design (which will be addressed extensively in Chapter 11), Arthur suggests that much has changed in creating Starbucks environments. “Our concepts in the 1990s were rooted in a thematic design, with a leading-edge color palette and extensive iconography. For example, we used a wonderful group of icons and swirls that gave us opportunities to present the siren and other nautical graphic design elements in fixture designs.”

By contrast, today Arthur indicates that his design teams work to provide flexible design approaches that allow individual in-house designers to use local artists and materials to make them more locally relevant in their look and feel. He also suggests that customers are looking for authenticity, seating choices, and places where they can connect with their community. According to Arthur, “We promote interaction and community gathering by providing unique and specific elements. The community table is one of them. The community table also allows for group meetings and participatory conversations about whatever is on someone’s mind. In addition, we’re trying to provide as many alternative-seating areas because of the varied need states of our customers who come in the morning, at noon, and in the evening. Maybe they will sit on a comfortable chair, in a nice settee, or at a community table. We are also incorporating 42-inch-high tables which complement the 30- and 36-inch tables. If you are coming in to work on a laptop, a 42-inch-high table is ergonomically better for you, as you can stand. It’s also an alternative kind of perch for people to experience the ‘life’ of the store that goes on versus sitting in a settee in the front or back section of a store.”

Starbucks leadership is comfortable experimenting with design elements that the leaders believe will address the evolving need states of the company’s customers. They consider emerging trends and observed customer behavior as they refine the stage on which their experiences are provided.

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REFLECTION ON CONNECTION

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1. Take a moment to put yourself in the place of your key customer group. As you walk through their experience, what elements of clutter or confusion stand out to you? What can be done to clean up these experience detractors? Repeat the exercise with other important customer groups.

2. If you were to do a “sensory audit” of your business, what would be your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities? What sights, sounds, smells, and tactile elements do your customers experience at key contacts with your brand?

3. Have you used or are you using disciplined processes like Lean (or Six Sigma) to increase efficiencies, improve your customer experience, or even determine the root cause of service breakdowns? If so, how has the customer experience improved? If you aren’t taking a disciplined approach, what would cause you to explore such processes?

Whether it is connecting the design of your physical space to your company’s mission, vision, and values; streamlining efficiencies to improve the customer experience; or adding sensory elements, successful customer experience enhancements have one unifying component: the need to execute the details. As Arthur puts it, “One of my mantras is, ‘The difference between mediocrity and excellence is attention to detail.’ The attention to detail that we put into every aspect of our business is geared toward staying on the leading edge of design and providing the most powerful, unique experience possible in our stores.”

Executing details to achieve leading-edge customer experiences works for Starbucks. How are you doing on perfecting the details of your desired customer experiences?

CO-CREATE THE EXPERIENCE WITH YOUR CUSTOMER

To provide the “leading-edge” experience that Arthur referred to, Starbucks leaders do more than observe, try, evaluate, and refine their offerings. Starbucks engages with customers to help the leaders prioritize experience improvement targets. In 2008, Starbucks was at the forefront of the online “co-creation with customers” movement. Cecile Hudon, online community manager at Starbucks, explains, “When we first launched the My Starbucks Idea website in March 2008, we felt we were losing some of the connection we had with our customers. So Howard Schultz spearheaded our effort to let customers know that we were listening. We did that by creating one of the earliest and most successful online idea sites at MyStarbucksIdea.com.”

Members of My Starbucks Idea can share, vote on, and discuss product, experience, and involvement ideas. As ideas are shared, site-goers vote on those ideas and also interact with Starbucks partners who can evaluate them and affect change. According to Cecile, “The secret to the success of the site is our customers get to talk to subject-matter experts who function as moderators. So as customers offer food items or suggest gluten-free products, for example, a partner from the Starbucks food team looks through those suggestions. If we had tried to support this site with a single person from, say, the marketing department, they may not recognize a good and relevant idea, because they are not as close to the work being done in each department and the process would be slower to move ideas forward. Today we have about 40 moderators that are on the site from all over the company listening to the ideas that are relevant to their work. Customers interacting with Starbucks partners in areas that they care about helps the customer feel a part of the company. Their opinion matters.”

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Infographic prepared by Starbucks for the five-year anniversary of My Starbucks Idea.

As items gain popularity through the votes of members in the community, moderators engage in dialogue about those ideas. Cecile notes, “We encourage the moderators to comment and look for responses to the most popular ideas each week, and also look for diamond in the rough ideas—innovative ideas that have low point scores because they may be too new of a concept for people to recognize as a good idea.”

Beyond commenting on ideas, moderators move the best options through a series of possible categories: “under review,” “reviewed,” “coming soon,” and “launched.” As ideas go under review, functional teams look at whether an idea is innovative, whether it is a differentiator for Starbucks, how quickly the idea can go to market, how much impact it will have on the customer experience, and whether it is a good business driver. Examples of ideas launched from My Starbucks Idea were identified in the infographic on the preceding pages.

More than 150,000 ideas have been submitted on the site, and 265 ideas launched, as of this writing. My Starbucks Idea has helped shape the Starbucks loyalty program, inspired the Starbucks Card eGift program, encouraged the company to sell reusable cup sleeves, and prioritized its recycling efforts. Years after the launch, the community is vital and active, with some users visiting more than 200 times a month. As customers continue to share their ideas with Starbucks partners, leadership continues to listen and respond. Partners participate on the consumer site, and a separate site has been created for them to offer ideas that affect their work lives and the experience of their store’s customers.

While Starbucks has developed a variety of other tools for engaging customer input, My Starbucks Idea demonstrates how customers and partners can be engaged in an advisory counsel function to suggest, prioritize, and invest in the evolution of experience offerings. How effectively are you mobilizing your engaged customers to help them help you address their wants and needs?

PERMISSION TO BUILD ON AN EXPERIENCE PLATFORM

If you deliver high-quality products in experiential environments, served up by knowledgeable and passionate staff members, customers not only will support your growth through that product line but are also likely to explore other offerings you innovate in the context of those core competencies. For Starbucks leadership, this has meant a growth plan that includes café environments serving other high-quality beverages—enter the Evolution Fresh™ and Tazo® tea stores.

In late 2011, Starbucks announced that it had acquired Evolution Fresh, Inc., “as part of its commitment to evolve and enhance the Customer Experience with innovative and wholesome products.” The move signaled that Starbucks would takes its beverage expertise into the $3.4 billion superpremium cold-pressed juice market and broadly into the $50 billion health and wellness sector.

Upon announcing the acquisition, Howard Schultz noted, “Our intent is to build a national health and wellness brand leveraging our scale, resources and premium product expertise. Bringing Evolution Fresh into the Starbucks family marks an important step forward in this pursuit.” Prior to the acquisition, Evolution Fresh sold premium juice products through health supermarkets such as Whole Foods. Evolution Fresh, which was created by the founder of Naked Juice, uses patented technology to pasteurize most of its juices without exposing them to nutrient-depleting heat.

By acquiring Evolution Fresh’s existing bottled juice products, Starbucks leadership expanded its presence in the consumer products goods space (which will be discussed in detail in Chapter 9, “Personal Relationships Translate: Sharing the Love from People to Products”) and also created a new experiential platform, Evolution Fresh retail stores. These stores focus on the same principles of customer experience crafted in a traditional Starbucks café environment, but adapt that experience in keeping with the health and wellness products that they sell.

Starbucks rolled out its first Evolution Fresh stores in the Seattle area. The centerpiece of these stores is the “tap wall,” which dispenses seasonal cold handcrafted juices like Field of Greens (a low-calorie blend of ginger, greens, organic apple, and cucumber) and natural smoothies. The stores also offer globally inspired, personalized food experiences with hot and cold selections, including breakfast items, lunch and dinner wraps, soups, sandwiches, and bowls (such as an under-300-calorie offering made up principally of quinoa, organic kale, and butternut squash). Of course, Evolution Fresh stores also sell Starbucks coffee and Tazo teas.

Kevin Petrisko, director of business operations, Evolution Fresh, describes the experience he wants customers to have in Evolution Fresh stores by noting, “Our vision is, a customer walks out and says, ‘Wow, that was a fantastic experience. I learned something new, I had an amazing human connection with the juice partner who guided me through this experience, ultimately the food or the drink taste like the fruit and vegetable it came from, and I have to return. I have to tell my friends how high the quality is of the food I’m eating and the beverage I’m drinking. I’ve learned something, and I understand how this is going to help me think differently about what I put into my body.’”

Other than the mention of Starbucks coffee on the menu board, there is no signage linking Evolution Fresh to Starbucks, yet online customer reviews frequently make the connection. This is exemplified by one review that reads, “Evolution Fresh is Starbucks newest addition to health food. Although spendy, it’s totally worth the experience. The partners behind the counter are knowledgeable and happy.” While Evolution Fresh is its own independent-branded store experience, the human connection anchors the retail stores to the essence of Starbucks.

Unlike Evolution Fresh, which represents a fairly recent foray into an adjacent beverage category, the Tazo tea stores are a newly evolved retail concept that links back to the origins of Starbucks. When it was founded in 1971, Starbucks was known as the Starbucks Coffee and Tea Company. As the company grew, the leaders positioned Starbucks with coffee at its core, but in 1999 they purchased a premium tea brand. A New York Times article from 1999 described that acquisition by noting, “Tazo, the Oregon company that once aspired to be the Starbucks of teas, has been bought out by the Starbucks Corporation…. The Seattle-based Starbucks hopes that with Tazo it can attract new customers.”

Effectively, Starbucks built Tazo from an $8.1 million purchase price in 1999 into a brand with more than $1.4 billion in sales, and recently positioned a retail concept to further grow the brand in a Tazo tea store setting. The first Tazo store opened in Seattle in November 2012 and provides a retail experience where customers can purchase more than 80 varieties of loose-leaf teas or enjoy a freshly brewed cup of tea—hot, iced, or prepared as a latte. In fact, customers work with Tazo partners to create their own unique tea flavors and can buy those personal blends by the ounce or by the cup.

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Tazo tea retail store, Seattle, Washington, USA.

According to Charles Cain, vice president, Tazo Merchandise and Operations, “In our Tazo tea retail store, we want to create an experiential offering and a place where customers can get a rich sense of our extraordinary teas. Additionally, we want to take a leadership role in exposing people to premium tea. When we hit our stride, we anticipate that 25 percent of our sales will be from prepared tea beverages and the remainder will be from the purchase of loose-leaf teas and related supplies for customers to prepare their beverages at home.”

Like the Evolution Fresh concept, the Tazo tea store is not branded with the iconic Starbucks logo. While having less emphasis on prepared beverages and more on take-home purchases, a Tazo tea retail store is marked by the same product passion and attention to experience detail highlighted throughout this chapter.

Annie Young-Scrivner, executive vice president and president, Starbucks Canada, expresses the aspiration of the leadership as it relates to the market relevance of decisions like the creation of the Tazo tea retail stores: “The tea category is exploding right now; it’s literally at the point where coffee was a number of years ago. The majority of tea is in filter bags, not full leaf, and we hope to elevate tea-drinking experiences across the global landscape. This is a particularly relevant opportunity given our commitment to beverage delivery in tea-drinking counties like China and India. Hopefully, our collective efforts around Tazo tea will represent a big win that is very complementary to what we are doing with coffee.” Stacy Speicher, director of category brand management, Tea, adds, “As we move into stores designed around products other than coffee, we guide our decisions by the most important common denominator—the customer. At the heart of everything we do are our customer insights and data. We need to understand who is buying tea, where they are, even how to reach them through social media or advertising. We need to understand our consumers backwards and forwards in order to do what we do best—connect with them.”

While the true success of Evolution Fresh or the Tazo tea retail concept won’t be fully known for years to come, it is clear that Starbucks success in product execution, customer connection, and experience design have allowed it to explore adjacent categories. Starbucks leadership appears to explore new business opportunities by asking questions like:

How can we translate our core competencies into future opportunities for our existing and prospective customers?

What external factors or consumer trends can guide us as we leverage our strengths?

How will this possibility serve our mission and elevate the experience of our customers and all stakeholders?

How will this opportunity enhance a connection of trust and love for those we serve?

In my view, these types of questions are relevant to every business leader. The final question, “How will this opportunity enhance a connection of trust and love?”, is addressed directly in the chapters that immediately follow under the principle titled “Love to Be Loved.”

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Images Human experiences are at the heart of your brand.

Images People can copy your products and your services, but seldom can they build the powerful connections with customers that emerge from the well-designed experiences that you deliver.

Images Observe and interact with your prospective employees to determine whether they are eager, teachable, and authentically interested in others.

Images Define your service vision in such a way that it describes what needs to be achieved during service experiences.

Images Well-designed experiences involve a willingness to see the environment from the customers’ perspective and attend to the needs of core customer segments.

Images Great customer experiences depend on both the addition and the removal of emotional stimuli and environmental design elements.

Images When it comes to the customer experience, quite often enhancements take the form of trial-and-error adjustments in an attempt to hit upon the right ingredients in the right quantities necessary to deliver an optimal customer experience.

Images Whether it is connecting the design of your physical space to your company’s mission, vision, and values; streamlining efficiencies to improve the customer experience; or adding sensory elements, successful customer experience enhancements have one unifying component, the need to execute the details.

Images Co-create your experience with your customers.

Images If you deliver high-quality products in experiential environments served by knowledgeable and passionate staff members, customers will support your growth through that product line and are also more likely to explore other offerings you innovate in the context of those core competencies.