Transformed Starbucks app boosts loyalty scheme membership by 67%

The challenge

Starbucks is the world’s largest coffeehouse chain. Like many global ‘Goliath’ brands, it faces growing competition from smaller challenger brands.

In Starbucks’ case, these disruptors are boutique baristas that focus on providing a highly convenient, personal, and memorable customer experience (CX).

Since CX is a key brand differentiator, a mobile app can be a competitive point of difference, helping a coffee brand to deliver personalised and rewarding experiences to loyal customers.

But with disappointing customer ratings, the Starbucks app was failing to deliver on this opportunity. There was a clear need to elevate the app experience in order to:

improve customer satisfaction and engagement
grow loyalty scheme membership
boost loyalty scheme revenue

What we did

We partnered with Starbucks to deliver a high performance app that delivers the best customer and business outcomes.

To do this we needed to help Starbucks become a more customer-centric, design-led organisation that puts customer insight at the heart of its processes and decision making.

Here’s how we approached the challenge.

Starbucks app on 4 different mobile phone screens

Conducting extensive user research. We created a customer research framework and surveyed more than 15,000 customers to better understand their behaviours and patterns. This allowed us to segment customers and uncover key UX improvement opportunities for the app. Running quantitative and qualitative research throughout the app design and delivery process helped us to continually test, learn, and optimise the app experience.

Improving collaboration and communication. The design and development of the legacy mobile app had been very delivery and engineering focused, with little attention to customer insight and problem solving. We created a cross-functional team spanning design, data, CX, marketing, and technology to elevate the voice of design, break down silos, and improve collaboration.

Customer experience mapping. We mapped our research findings against core customer journeys to reveal 94 pain points. For example, our research showed that 70% of Starbucks customers customise their drinks, but the app didn’t give people the option to add favourites. This exercise revealed 91 opportunities to improve the app UX, as well as ways to enhance the in-store experience using the app.

Prototyping and user testing. We ran one-to-one interviews to put a clickable prototype in the hands of Starbucks customers. This allowed us to validate new designs and refine them based on continuous customer feedback.

Building a prioritised backlog. We worked with Starbucks’ CX team to create a prioritised product backlog for their tech partners to deliver in sprints. To measure the impact of our improvements we installed a measurement framework to guide further enhancements and experience optimisation.

Key outputs of these activities included:

A comprehensive customer experience map
An EMEA CX playbook
Detailed wireframes
Key page designs
A prioritised product backlog
A functional spec
A robust and flexible measurement framework

The results

Starbucks needed a world-class app experience to improve customer engagement and increase loyalty scheme sign-ups and revenue.

The result of our partnership was a high performance app that’s driving better customer and business outcomes, including a:

67% increase in rewards sign-up
48% rise in customer engagement
12% uplift in revenue via active Starbucks rewards members

Together, we implemented a scalable, customer-centric process, enabling the team to reimagine and future-proof the world’s most famous coffee experience.