- My overall impression of the site is that the site (Starbucks, 2010) effectively encourages discussion among Starbucks’ customers, as well as between Starbucks’ staff and the customers. Since the sole purpose of the site is to seek feedback from customers, there’s nothing on the site that will distract the customers from that purpose. I also think that Starbucks is sincere in its approach to identifying new products and services as they do make an effort to grant the customers’ requests or to address their concerns. Staff members of Starbucks provide updates on initiatives that are based on the customers’ feedback and status updates can also be easily seen right on the front page where the completed initiatives are marked with check marks while ongoing initiatives have notes attached to them.
- The key elements of the site are the features that allow customers to enter their ideas and their comments about other customers’ ideas, as well as the feature that allows customers to vote on these ideas. Another key element is the section where staff members provide updates on the action being taken by the company to address the customers’ concerns. In this way, the site is different from an electronic suggestion box as electronic suggestion boxes are usually one-way in that customers can only provide suggestions but won’t get comments about their suggestions either from the company or from fellow customers.
- Critics of the site think that Starbucks posts only the positive comments of customers and “censors” the negative ones. However, I don’t think that this is a valid concern because I did see some negative comments on the site, although they were not said in a disrespectful way. Should Starbucks censor the overly rude and offensive comments then I think that they have the right to do so, as keeping such comments on the site will give visitors of the site an unpleasant experience and may prevent them from using the site.
- Yes, I think that Starbucks took the right approach in engaging its customers as crowdsourcing enables the company to get a vast number of ideas on how to improve their products and services (Daily Crowdsource, n.d.). They get such ideas for free, but this endeavor also leaves the customers more satisfied as it makes them feel that they are being heard.
References
Daily Crowdsource. (n.d.). What is crowdsourcing? Retrieved from
http://dailycrowdsource.com/crowdsourcing-basics/what-is-crowdsourcing.
Starbucks. (2010). My Starbucks Idea. Retrieved from mystarbucksidea.com.
References
