Transforming the Digital Retail Experience

Over the past decade, the retail landscape has gone through a dramatic transformation. Modern-day retailers must create a unique customer experience in their store and then extend that experience to create relevant digital customer relationships. Great customer experiences become destinations, and destinations are complemented and amplified through digital customer relationships. That is the transformative formula for modern-day brick-and-mortar retailers.

Starbucks was built around the concept of the third place – a destination for people who come to enjoy moments of connection over coffee outside of work and away from home. Starbucks is a destination that customers seek out and, over the past decade, more and more customers have been seeking experiences that offer convenience as well as connection. Starbucks invested early to address shifting consumer behaviors and extended the third place through personalized, digital mobile connections with our customers through the Starbucks Mobile App.

In the last two years, the Starbucks mobile app has become one of the most popular apps in the world. We have focused on creating a digital flywheel that extends the customer experience we create in our stores and dramatically grown digital customer relationships. In fact, over the past year we have served more than one billion digital customer occasions.

This week, we announced two new exciting milestones in as we continue to expand our digital capabilities and reach more customers. 

 The first is an announcement with tech company Brightloom, which will create an end-to-end digital customer experience platform. As part of the agreement, Starbucks has licensed select software components of our digital flywheel to Brightloom which, when combined with its own assets, will create a one-stop-shop digital flywheel for Starbucks global license partners who don’t currently have a digital flywheel and ultimately for the entire restaurant industry.

This partnership allows us to amplify the focus our world-class tech talent here at Starbucks on proprietary software development that powers the digital flywheel in our company-operated markets.

We also announced plans to expand Starbucks Delivers, in partnership with Uber Eats, to markets throughout the U.S. by early 2020. After a successful rollout to 11 markets in the U.S, we are excited to work with Uber Eats and take another step forward to deliver Starbucks to customers wherever they may be, while constantly creating a high-quality experience.

This is an exciting time for Starbucks as we extend the third place experience to include more relevant digital scenarios and better serve our customers