FreshNetworks Blog

I signed up for mystarbucksidea this weekend - a new customer feedback and engagement site launched by Starbucks this week. In the vein of Dell’s Ideastorm, the new Starbucks site is an online customer opinions box. As with Dell’s site, customers can sign up and then leave comments or suggestions. Other users can ‘vote’ for a suggestion or leave another comment on it. See here for a quick comparison of these two sites.

At their best, sites like this can be really poawerful for brands. They provide a controlled mechanism for customer feedback, allow all points of view to be heard but only those that have mass popularity (and so higher votes) to emerge as ones that a brand might take forward. By addiding comments, customers and contributors can cocreate rounded ideas. And at their most powerful, the brands themselves will feedback what has happened with, at least, the most popular ideas.

Closing the feedback loop is critical to the success of sites such as these. At the moment, most of the comments are suggesting (perhaps unsurprisingly) either free coffees for regulars (on their birthday, after buying nine cups etc) or free Wi-Fi. To move the conversation on from this and to get some real and innovative cocreation of ideas, Starbucks needs to respond to and close repetitive threads such as this. It’s why at FreshNetworks we think that Community Management is critical to making any online customer engagement tool a success. We need to close the Starbucks feedback loop, explain why customers can (or why they cannot) get free coffee / Wi-Fi and then point any future comments such as this to the same response. This shows that you are listening, but also lets other, more creative comments and ideas shine through.