My Starbucks Idea

http://mystarbucksidea.force.com

This site is interesting to me on a couple of different levels. According to the home page, the purpose of the site is to “shape the future of Starbucks—with your ideas”. Sounds feel-good enough, doesn’t it? The site is basically a Web 2.0 take on the good old fashioned suggestion box with a hint of digg.com. Being the somewhat cynical person that I am, to me, the site screams “our sales numbers are on the decline and we’ll try anything…”

This site is also interesting to me because rather than building a custom app, Starbucks chose to use force.com, a product of salesforce.com. According to SalesForce, “Force.com is the world’s first Platform as a Service (PaaS), enabling developers to create and deliver any kind of business application, entirely on-demand and without software.”

In any case, even if the site is an concealed ploy from a corporate giant looking to help struggling sales, I think the lesson learned is that all companies can benefit from listening more to the voice of the customer and more importantly, taking actions based on what the masses are saying. Now that they've put this out there, we'll see if Starbucks will walk the talk.

Posted by sandra

10:53 AM 0 comments

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