Just in Time for Starbucks - Case Study Example

This paper seeks to analyze Starbucks Operations Management in the lights of broad and diverse academic resources. Recent research conducted in the market suggests that Starbucks has been unsuccessful in meeting expectations of consumers in the customer satisfaction domain. The organization needs to devise and implement a strategic plan in order to generate revenues as well as improving customer satisfaction. Market research suggests that Starbucks was considered to be the biggest coffeehouse in the United States as well as in other countries.

It concentrated on younger, lower income, customers. At the same time, it is not meeting the demands of customers in the customer satisfaction domain (Thompson & Martin, 145). At Starbucks, the Senior Management is responsible for analyzing the outcomes of the market research so that it could understand the factors which led to customer dissatisfaction in order to devise plan to meet their demands and increase revenues and sales. In recent times, the demographics of conventional Starbucks have changed.

Now days, younger, low income and less educated customers visit the coffee house. Research suggests that traditional customers in the past were considered to be white collar customers aged between twenty five and forty (Zeithaml, 50). Although several factors were identified which had made an impact on customer satisfaction, the speed of service and overall service have been acknowledged as the most important. The company has spent and invested huge amount of money of employee benefits in order to maintain speed of service.

CompetitionResearch suggests that Starbucks was ahead of its competitors in operations and profitability. In the United States, Starbucks have competed against several coffeehouse chains. Its competitors include Caribou Coffee, independent specialty coffee outlets, Dunkin Donuts, etc. Company Strategy and ObjectiveThe aim and objective of Starbucks is to establish itself as the most popular and famous coffee brand in the world by concentrating on expansion of retails and introducing new products.

At the same time, it concentrates on creating a memorable experience around coffee consumption and to accomplish it, they have expanded and operated an experimental branding approach. Customer service was integral part of this approach. ContextAs mentioned earlier, Starbucks strives for innovation and keeps on investing on new products in order to generate sales and profits. The recent market research indicates that customer service was deemed as unsatisfactory because customers viewed Starbucks as a giant corporation which concentrates on making profits and expanding it self.

This indicates that using customer snapshot scores were ineffective in determining the service performance (Hammonds, 245). Consequently, the senior management is worried and needs to devise a plan in order to address the issue of customer satisfaction. By investing more than forty million dollars on additional labor hours is uncertain and risky because this strategy would only concentrate on improvement of speed of service. RecommendationsThe company needs a wide ranging diverse and broad strategy, which concentrate on customer service.

This strategy should concentrate on understanding the needs of the customers and improving their experience. With the improvement in customer satisfac