Many companies make it difficult to reach them when you have a comment or problem. You often have to dig deep on a website to find a contact number or email address. Not Starbucks. I’ve always been impressed with how the company goes out of its way to solicit customer feedback and engage in conversations. I was in a Starbucks recently and noticed a small brochure that said, “Share your thoughts with us.” I liked its message: “It’s how we know we’re making your experience at Starbucks the best it can be. So please tell us what’s working, or if there’s anything we could be doing better. Don’t worry. We’ll take it personally.”
Beyond that, I was impressed that Starbucks creates custom feedback brochures for each district that gives customers many ways to provide feedback:
- Main customer service number
- http://www.starbucks.com/customer-service/contact (a number of ways to reach Starbucks online, through social media conversations, etc.)
- Mailing address
- The name of the district manager (yes – you read that right)
- The district manager’s phone number (yes, really!)
- The district manager’s email address (yes, really again!)
- The store number you visited.
Beyond that, Starbucks takes the whole customer feedback and conversation strategy to the next level. Have you heard of mystarbucksidea.com? It’s an online forum that allows customers to share ideas on products, experience and community. Customers can post their ideas, comment on ideas (Starbucks does, too) and vote on ideas to give them points. Starbucks lets you know which ideas are in action via blog posts written by actual Starbucks corporate employees.
Do you know of any companies using great techniques to solicit customer feedback?
See our related post on Costco’s approach to customer feedback.