Amplify the CX-EX Connection

Leading the Starbucks Way is one in a series of insightful books by Joseph A. Michelli about how exemplars in customer experience build a customer-driven culture. Other CX exemplars that Michelli has written about include Ritz Carlton and Zappos. All his books share a common theme around the importance of inspiring and engaging your employees, and how everyone in your organization can play a role in forging a stronger emotional connection with your customers. This is at the core of The CX and Culture Connection, my own book and podcast, both with the same name. I’m looking forward to having Michelli on the podcast soon. Keep an eye out for video reels on LinkedIn with links to the full episode!

Leading the Starbucks Way paints a vivid picture of how the company reinforces an emotional connection with its customers and employees, whom Starbucks calls partners. Michelli shows how Starbucks taps into deeper meaning for how it fits into customers’ lives and builds community around the brand. This aligns well to the concept of an Experience Collage in my own book, through which you can do more than deliver a transactional, usage-based experience, creating a rich collage that pieces together experiences that deepen meaning, encourage shared experiences, and build community. The experiences in your collage are stronger when they bring together digital and physical experiences, which your frontline employees reinforce through behaviors that are aligned to your brand promise. In Leading the Starbucks Way, Michelli does a fantastic job bringing to life how Starbucks excels at reinforcing the CX-EX connection that is key to reinforcing its growth flywheel.

Leading the Starbucks Way is organized around 5 principles that are key to Starbucks’ success. Let’s touch on each of them briefly. I highly recommend reading the full book to see how you can apply these principles for your own CX, EX, and culture evolution efforts!

Principle 1: Savor and Elevate

Starbucks appreciates that to truly deliver a great customer experience its partners (employees) need to connect more deeply with the brand themselves. Starbucks invests in several ways to reinforce each partner’s passion for coffee and the unique Starbucks culture. Starbucks goes beyond providing product and skills training to be a great barista. Starbucks showcases rituals for preparing and serving coffee, while helping partners to participate in storytelling around the farm to cup journey. They are ambassadors for the brand to celebrate the economic, social, and environmental stories that make Starbucks part of a global community that also benefits from authentic local connections.

Michelli shows how Starbucks employees start their learning journey with knowledge of coffee varieties, food pairings, and coffee tasting rituals, and then continue their journeys through getting badged as a Coffee Master and Coffee Ambassador. In The CX and Culture Connection, I talk about human beings’ innate drives to bond and learn. Michelli does a masterful job at showing how Starbucks taps into these drives to bond and learn to reinforce the intrinsic motivation of its employees to be proud of their contributions to the customer experience.

Michelli further shows how employees’ awareness and attention to four specific cultural behaviors are key to delivering an exceptional customer experience: anticipate, connect, personalize, and own. He shows how partners use their emotional intelligence to spot how customers feel in the moment and tailor the experience based on these four cultural behaviors. Starbucks empowers its employees to contribute to the right experience for each customer in the moment. Michelli shows how the employees’ motivation and commitment to deliver a great experience are key to delivering on Starbucks’ brand promise, even as Starbucks enjoys exceptionally low employee turnover due to employees’ engagement with the brand.

Principle 2: Love to be Loved

Michelli quotes Starbucks’ Chairman emeritus and two-time CEO Howard Schultz emphasizing the “deposits in the reservoir of trust” that Starbucks makes with customers. Starbucks knows that it must continuously create new experiences that reinforce trust. To elaborate further on this important concept, Michelli introduces the Gallup model for progression of emotion. First, trust is a gateway emotion if customers are satisfied with a product or service with consistent quality (the usage experience in your Experience Collage). Second, customers’ feel more confident that if something goes wrong, then the company can be counted on to address any issues quickly and in the right way. Finally, customers’ association with the brand allows it to play a more meaningful and personal role in their lives, where they start to think of the brand more as they would a friend or relative (getting beyond usage and tapping into sharing, meaning, and community, too, within your Experience Collage). Starbucks invests in CX holistically to reinforce customer trust through all its interactions with customers.

Again, Michelli comes back to the importance of the CX-EX intersection to reinforce trust and its importance to nurturing brand love. From their initial barista training onwards, Starbucks reinforces a consistent message to partners to “assess the customer’s need,” “own responsibility,” “avoid the blame game,” and “make it right” with urgency. Leaders train and develop partners to create inspired moments by defining the service behaviors that should always or never occur. Inspired moments are those where partners exceed basic service expectations. Through its employee rewards programs, Starbucks emphasizes intrinsic motivation rather than monetary rewards. For example, Starbucks’ M.U.G., Bravo, and Green Apron awards involve pins, handwritten notes, or certificates to acknowledge achievement. These provide social currency as partners wear them on their aprons and are proud to showcase them and talk about them with others.

Principle 3: Reach for the Common Good

Starbucks is a global brand with more than 38,000 stores globally in more than 80 countries. Starbucks works hard to balance universalism and local cultural relevance. It is important that the Starbucks brand be perceived as an authentic member of the communities in which it operates. Starbucks brand leadership depends on its being seen as a responsible and caring steward across the farm to cup journey, while also being seen as supportive of all its employees and engaged within local communities. Community service is one way Starbucks reinforces this balance, encouraging employees to engage in hundreds of thousands of hours of community service across a highly decentralized set of initiatives that employees and customers do together. This further reinforces the local connection that partners have with customers in their communities, while further deepening employee engagement and retention.

Principle 4: Mobilize the Connection

Starbucks is known for being the “third place,” providing a place to relax and meet others for a broad set of occasions beyond the home and office. The store experience is highly “phygital,” combining a digital experience pre-store (e.g., mobile ordering) with a digital experience in store (e.g., free wi-fi, music downloads), and of course a physical experience that appeals to all the senses and includes interactions with not only Starbucks’ employees but other customers sharing experiences with one another. Starbucks has also extended the brand across the first place (home) and second place (office) through brand extensions such as home brewing systems and branded solutions for quality coffee at work. Beyond product usage, Starbucks also reinforces other elements beyond the product experience through digital experiences across customers’ platforms of choice that provide authentic and interesting content.

Principle 5: Cherish and Challenge Your Legacy

Starbucks truly cares about its partners, its customers, and its communities, and focuses on the long term as it invests in its customer and employee experiences. Starbucks commitments to sustainability, environmental stewardship, and employee welfare are well known and reinforced through the actions of employees across the organization, not just centralized investments. Beyond cultural behaviors at the frontline level, Starbucks also cultivates a set of leadership behaviors among its leaders and managers. This shows through in how Starbucks reinforces a safe space to take risks, while being sensitive to what it will take for employees across the organization to embrace change. Relevant leadership behaviors include setting goals, taking action, and measuring progress. In this way, cultural behaviors have both a direct and indirect impact on the customer and employee experience at Starbucks and reinforce its strength as a lifestyle brand and employee of choice.

I hope you will enjoy reading the full book and checking out my upcoming podcast with Michelli. If you’d like to check out other book reviews, you can find them here. If you’d like to see other podcasts, click here to scan a complete list of episodes. Be sure to like and subscribe to my podcast, The CX and Culture Connection, on your podcast platform of choice. I hope these spark some great ideas for you!