Starbucks: Don’t Annoy Your Customers!

I personally am not a real fan of Starbucks. I know, that comment alone will get some backlash. Yes, I am amazed at what they have been able to accomplish with a simple (high-end) coffee shop. The Starbucks story is one of legend in the business community and is the subject of many a business school case. I just am not a fan of paying big-bucks for a coffee. Sure, there is the atmosphere and all that. It’s just not really my thing. My wife on the other hand…she is hooked…big time!

Tonight, she comes home with a Starbucks pre-pay reloadable card. I happen to have the laptop online and she asks me to help her “reload” her card. So, onward we go to Starbucks.com.

The first thing I notice is that the site is pretty plain given all the “atmosphere” and “experience” that Starbucks is known for. I guess that doesn’t transfer to the web. Secondly, the site opens with a letter to “Partners” from Howard Schultz (since writing this they have removed the letter from the mainpage). Why they would put that on the the main-page of the site I am not sure. Presumably, they have, or could have a special section of the site for partners/owners/employees etc. My feeling was, why are you wasting your customer’s time with this?

Third, there is this really annoying flash icon in the right margin that slides up and down every page that says “Got an Idea?”. Here’s an idea…stop annoying your customers and do away with that icon! Fine if it should appear once. Not fine that it should be on every page and you can’t make it go away (even after you click on it)!

Finally, to reload the card requires us to create an account for her. So, we fill in all the relevant contact information and create the account. Then the next phase, to re-load the card requires her to fill in all the relevant contact information a second time…we just gave you that information when we created the account! Oh, and there was a requirement to fill in a “PIN”. Next to that was a link that said “What’s This?” Since we did not know what the PIN was, we clicked on it and it did not link anywhere. I thought maybe it was a browser issue attributing the error to FireFox, so opened a different browser window in Safari…still no success. Again, no excuse for annoying your customer. After a litte more digging we resolved the PIN issue.

The general assessment from me the marketer is that for a company that is heralded for their marketing genius, it certainly seems that they are operating on the sub-par level in web customer service. The lesson for us in all this…test your site. Make it easy to navigate, make sure all the links work, impress your customer, and for goodness sake…don’t annoy them! So, I am still not a fan of Starbucks…how about you?