On Coffee, Spills and Service: Customer Focus the Starbucks Way

A couple of weeks ago I was in Dallas, and had a minor coffee-based incident.  Someone bumped into me in Starbucks, and the almost-full drink I had in my hand did a spectacular impression of a waterfall down my (luckily water-resistant) coat, over my bag, and finished by cascading onto the floor. 

Before I’d even had a chance to react, the Starbucks staff swung into action.  One Barista immediately escorted the clumsy bumper away.  Another came straight to me with cloths (and genuine concern) to check me for damage, get me to wipe off my iPhone which had been in my other hand, and help me clean myself up.  Whilst I was doing that she moved my bag to a table near a fan (“for your coat”) and then mopped the coffee on the floor.  A third Barista nipped out and put a ‘wet floor’ sign near us, and then made a replacement coffee to my exact prior order.  By the time I’d wiped the coffee of my coat, my phone was dry and working, I had a comfy chair waiting for me near a fan with my bag and a replacement drink, and no-one slipped in the pool of coffee.  It was seamless, accomplished without discussion and skilfully done.  Within a few minutes they had a grateful if slightly soggy customer, and everyone else feeling secure in the vicinity that “a good job had been done”, thus validating their choice of café.

And the whole thing was a beautiful example of a working brand and corporate culture.   

Starbucks is an interesting company.  They are a chain selling what is a fairly basic product which has created a high value offering through customer service over and above the actual product itself.  Howard Behar, the former president of Starbucks: “We’re not in the coffee business, serving people.  We’re in the people business serving coffee.”

Starbucks is aware that their coffee isn't the best on the market (although it is very protective of it), but that’s not their unique selling point.  Everything about Starbucks is about the experience; from the ambience, to the furniture, to their additional services like the free wifi (one of the first businesses to offer this to their customers).  It’s supposed to make people want to go there and spend time, and the coffee is in many ways incidental.  Despite the mixed reactions in the UK, it’s why they ask your name for your coffee: to personalise your experience and acknowledge you as an individual rather than just the 12^th customer ordering “a small skinny latte”.  It’s the extended 7 Ps to the nth degree.

One of the areas where Starbucks puts a huge amount of investment is in their staff.  There is a basic understanding that many people who work at café chains are likely to be school leavers, and so will not necessarily have the skills to deal with angry customers day in, day out with the required ‘Starbucks attitude”.     

Most customer-facing organisations will give training on how to deal with irate customers usually with an interaction model such as ‘Laugh’ (Listen and Empathise/Acknowledge/Understand/Give Solutions/Hit home with Follow-ups).   They also try to employ people-focused staff who genuinely care about the customer experience.  Overall. this means customers will get sympathy and an attempt to solve the problem with tact and care.

Starbucks does the above, but goes beyond this.  A key foundation in their training is scenario planning: not something that many customer-focused organisations will do and certainly not at a basic level.  Scenario planning is the idea of creating the story of a series of possible or plausible events for businesses at a strategic level, allowing possible responses to be crafted with an understanding of potential options.  Starbucks has rolled this out to an operational, staff level.

Practice and scenario planning make it much easier to react in a crisis without feeling under pressure, personally under threat or lost.  It also makes the whole reaction faster and more effective because the thinking has already been done for you, and when you are dealing with employees with less experience, that can be critical.  Getting a customer to wipe off their phone before their coat isn't something that would be immediately obvious to do, but a broken phone will have more of a long term effect on their perception: clothes can be washed but phones can’t.  By examining what could go wrong in advance, many of the standard pitfalls can be avoided.

In my case, there probably was already a scenario plan with the key elements of: “potential injury” (burns) “potential property loss” (phone), “upset customer” (soggy with no coffee), “potential disturbance” (had I decided to be terribly non-British and cause a scene for being bumped), and “potential safety hazard” (slippery floor).  The issues were dealt with in order of priority, with each Barista taking a key role.  It was noticeable that the floor was dealt with last, once the safety aspect was covered.  By covering potential scenarios in advance, there was no confusion as to what needed doing and in what order, and the low key delivery ensured the least disturbance for anyone else there.  

However, there can be drawbacks to this approach.  The most obvious is the inevitable resource drain.  Compiling a lot of potential situations takes time and personnel.  Since the world is an infinite place, the task can expand to take as much time as allotted and still need more.  Scenario planning can easily become a full time job in any organisation, and drawing a line where diminishing returns on staff time become clear can be tough.  With regards to the Starbucks example as this goes down to a grass roots level, training all of your staff – repeatedly – at all levels is taking them away from their core roles and means you will need more staff to cover that time. 

There’s another more insidious drawback as well: by training them to react by rote, there is a removal of some of the basic processes of problem solving.  You know that saying, give a man a fish and feed him for a day, but teach him to fish and feed him for his life?  What happens if your beautifully drilled staff comes across a situation not covered in the scenario training?  It’s a toss-up: is it worth having near perfect service 95% of the time, with a potential 5% possibility for complete confusion, or to have mostly good service with problem solving ability 99.9% of the time?

It's a strategic choice, and no matter how you slice (or pour) it, it's a choice on how you want your business and employees to function.  So far, Starbucks has worked amazingly: it's worth billions and is one of the most recognised brands in the world.  At the same time, I am less convinced of how it would work in something like a consultancy, research or any kind of more in-depth creative role.  If you need to foster people's own free thinking skills, programming them for reactions does seem limiting.

And me?  Well, my day went on as planned, and if I had a vague eau de cafe, everyone I met was polite enough not to mention it.