Joseph Michelli’s Leading the Starbucks Way: 5 Principles for Connecting with Your Customers, Your Products and Your People, is a lesson in strategic marketing that few books meant for that purpose can even come close. .
Related Podcast and Transcription: The Starbucks Way of Connecting to Customers
Joe: Do they have standards that they take the employees through. For example, every barista has to get out from behind the counter and walk among the people or anything like that?
Joseph Michelli: Absolutely! Not only sweep the cafe kind of thing for all the environmental factors, but they have these values walk that happens once a shift, and it rotates across the baristas and that values walk actually starts outside. It’s not just kind of doing the sweep inside the cafe, and it’s not that you immediately go and fix anything you just don’t remediate what you see. It’s a real ethnocentric look, Kind of a look that you might have if you’re a cultural anthropologist, and you’re walking into the environment and you’re just scanning for everything you see. You’re going to be looking at the nature of the interaction. You’ll be looking for dust on the top of something. It’s an attempt to walk from the customer’s view through the experience and then documents those things. The beauty of it is; you’re not tasked to actually fix everything yourself, you’re more likely to acknowledge that there are things. Whereas if your job is if you see it fix it, this is just kind of see it, observe it, identify it and then we’ll know to fix it when we have our first opportunity.
Joe: What comes to mind is… and I don’t know how Starbucks teaches it, so I have to ask the question? It is the ability to be able to see like an artist. How do you instill that in an employee?
Joseph Michelli: Well I mean first you have to have them want to see it. I mean car renters don’t care if their car is dirty. That’s why nobody washes their rent a car. I mean you have an ownership stake in something to want to see something. I think it starts long before you giving them tools to see and it goes back to the way you treat them early on and whether or not they want to follow you, if they want to join you in looking for things that will transform a customer experience. It starts there but beyond all those cultural foundational, orientation on boarding things I think that it gets down to putting them in a position where they’re expected to look. By putting them out there and say "Every shift, somebody’s going to look." Looking must be important, right? I mean in business where nobody seems to be looking at that kind of stuff, where there is dust and mold and mildew and grime and growing in corners and crannies. I walk in there and realize "Hey, we’re not supposed to be looking at that stuff; I have blinders to it just like the management does." I think by creating processes that cause you to be vigilant it sets a priority that is important. That’s what Lean’s all about in many ways I think it sets the priority for us to look for efficiencies and look for value, and we live by that. We dedicate ourselves to those systems so guess- what, efficiency and values are important to our business, "Hello".
Joe: I agree with you and to me I would think Starbucks has a very precise on boarding program when they bring someone on.
Joseph Michelli: Absolutely do! Some of it is the operational checklist, some of it specific OJTs skills developments, and certification that you’ve achieved those skill levels. Some of it is corporate rituals. If you come in and I just hired you Joe. You come in, and I just hired you to research Starbucks I’m going to sit down a cup of coffee with you before we do anything else. I’m going to ingrain the culture, so that you realize that before anything else it’s coffee. That what it’s about, it’s about sitting down and savoring a conversation over a cup of coffee that’s what we do. Before I can even get into all of how we do it, how we make that coffee, I need to make it really clear to you by my own actions that this is important. Then while you’re on-board in addition in teaching you skills, I have to make the perfect espresso shot. I’m also going to teach you about all the different growing regions where the origins of coffees come from, and you’re going to go through a coffee passport where you’re going to taste coffees from all over the world. You’re going to write your own notes and observations about their flavour profile, and that is bringing you up to speed to understand that is not enough to shove a cup in someone’s face. You best understand where the coffee came from, the nuances of that coffee and what that flavour indicates about that customer’s life. I think that’s how you bring people on; you get them excited, you get them inside of the fold. They’re no longer coffee preparers; they’re creating experiences that uplift to the coffee, to the conversation, to the physical environment which they bring customers.
Related Podcast and Transcription: The Starbucks Way of Connecting to Customers
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