Product development and support - http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/

Why this example was selected

Starbucks is in a business about as far as possible from technology and software, unlike some of the examples offered so far as benchmarks. While many of the Mass Collaboration ideas have come from the technology field in areas such as Open Source software, Starbucks shows how any organizations can embrace Mass Collaboration and make it work for them.

Source: observation of the community.

Figure MyStarbucksIdea OPTO scores.

Outcome – 3

The outcome is somewhat subjective, since it is hard to measure the exact impact on Starbuck’s business. In simple terms, they have about 13,000 additional people per month joining their already 172,000 employees who are already receiving a great deal of feedback and ideas from customers in their physical stores. Overall though, Starbuck’s is soliciting feedback on everything from their products and service to their communications and corporate social responsibility – if nothing else, they are able to augment whatever other research they are doing. In terms of quickly getting feedback on worthwhile ideas and getting them implemented, Starbuck’s is giving more of their customers a way to participate and “own” more of the experience.

However it is not clear how many ideas are making it through the process – are ideas particularly hard to implement? Not good enough? Looking at the list of “Launched” ideas, it seems to be a trickle when compared to the volume of ideas being submitted on voted on. If this site is ultimately about usable ideas, this seems like a weak outcome. Then again, if these few ideas have a large impact, who is to say.

People - 4

From the start, Starbucks had thousands of contributors –nearly 75,000 ideas in the first six months of operation. It’s not clear exactly how Starbucks generated this type of response, but they overcame one of the most difficult problems – getting critical mass for Mass Collaboration. That said, what percent of people who visit Starbuck’s each day are submitting ideas? The site receives almost 13,000 visitors in May 2009, according to Compete.com. If Starbucks serves about 20 million people per week in 2004, that makes the level of participation very low. At this scale though, Starbucks is likely benefitting from far more ideas than most organizations (direct competitors or otherwise) so this might not be critical.

Tools - 3

MyStarbucksIdea makes use of a suite of tools developed by Salesforce.com, best known for their Customer Relationship Management tools. The interface is simple and follows familiar online user experiences for submitting ideas, commenting and voting. This means it is easy for people to get started. The use of blog seems simple, but it is appropriate to enable flexible communications on issues from updates on the progress of ideas to introductions to new Starbucks Moderators.

It’s not clear why there aren’t easy ways to interact with the site via mobile – after all, I suspect that many good ideas occur to people while they are at a Starbucks location. Beyond that, search is week, so it’s not clear if an idea has been submitted before (so I don’t know where to join in). It also seems like people should be able to interact either in very general terms, as they do now, but also down to specific locations, as there are likely some location-specific ideas.

Organization – 4

Behind the scenes Starbucks is doing a number of things to make sure that people have a good experience using the tools by cleaning up duplicate ideas and making sure sufficient moderators are available to participate in the conversation and enforce their terms of service. Beyond the maintenance Starbucks has managed to involved the right people from across their organization – rather than having people search out the right department or groups to talk to, everyone just comes to the site and makes sure that the right Starbucks people “own” the right ideas. This removes a layer of complexity for customers who can just focus on their ideas and not the logistics associated with where it goes. Finally, Starbucks goes to great lengths to show what happens to the ideas and how they are impacting the organization.

From an incentives perspective, if people can make change to their Starbuck’s experience, this seems like an ideal situation, particularly if they see their ideas getting implemented. Starbucks lets others help to filter the idea, which ultimately helps them make decisions about what might be best. It is not clear how the system might be gamed, but this does not appear to be an issue.