Starbucks Needs Your Advice
A very interesting idea started up by Starbucks recently.
It is about crowdsourcing - the company has introduced a MyStarbucksIdea.com website where you can register to share your ideas about just how the company could improve. The visitors can view the ideas by recent, popular and top all-time (which must be the same as popular I guess).
The registered users are encouraged to share their ideas and vote for already posted ones. Behind this are the Starbucks’ employees who are specialists in various fields, and they will respond to the advice - not directly to users but by acting, hopefully.
There’s also a blog page - called Ideas In Action - where the company will most probably describe the way they are acting on the advice received from the community. So far there are just a couple of posts - one welcoming by Howard Schultz, and one from Chris Bruzzo, where he wow-thanks the community participants and encourages them to keep on sharing.
This is a great way to get even deeper into communications with the customer community and have a better knowledge of their preferences. Crowdsourcing is a win-win for the parties, and Starbucks should keep their efforts on this site - more and better communication and, more importantly, show action to the community who take their time to share their knowledge…