The objective is to make our customers feel as if they are having a real human interaction -- that they are not just dealing with cogs in a big machine. As a smaller entrepreneurial company, we have this luxury, and we exploit itwe usually reply to a customer complaint with an e-mail that includes a discount offer on the purchase of another product. But rather than automate the message, we have opted instead to create a written template that staff members have to manually cut and paste into the body of an e-mail.
There's an internal deployment manual [at Starbucks] that has instructions for where every employee should stand and what he or she should be doing at any given time. According to the anonymous posters on Starbucks Gossip, if you follow the instructions in that manual carefully, your branch can make more drinks, faster, and this will cause Starbucks HQ to allow you to hire even more people, and then there's less work for everyone.
All of this fancy optimization stuff is called operations research. It's what Michael Gerber talks about in his best-selling book The E-Myth Revisited. If you're planning to expand your business to a certain scale, you must first establish procedures and build systems to get predictable outcomes so that your employees can produce decent results even when they're not having a great day. It's a real academic field of study, and it's really hard and really important. You need to hire pretty smart people to do studies and experiments and collect the statistics and then figure out what it all means.
... as it has grown, Starbucks seems to have lost its knack for figuring out whether the policies dreamed up at HQ are really going to work in the field. Indeed, most of the people posting on Starbucks Gossip seem to agree that Starbucks HQ is hopelessly naive about the reality of the employees' daily work lives. Those icy blended drinks might bring in more customers in the summer, but they take too long to make, so the lines are crazy. And when the lines are crazy, the staff has a hard time keeping the store clean. Hence, my local Starbucks branches are consistently dirtier and messier than the average McDonald's. That's one problem among many.
Systems need to be flexible, and managers need to be wary of procedures that, applied blindly, can cross the line into something that looks more like antagonism toward customers. When we put a customer service policy in place at Fog Creek Software, we always deliberately leave a lot of room for our frontline people to use their own judgment -- heck, we require it.
(in toto)
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