17 February 2008
On February 26th Starbucks nationwide will be close for re-training. Quality at Starbucks has been going down so Howard Schultz has decided to close the 7,100 stores from 5:30-8:30 PM to train the employees.
Although this demonstrates a desire to improve quality and keep the customer’s happy, I want to know why the employees were not trained correctly the FIRST time. Quality should not be sacrificed because an employee is not willing to do their job properly.
Also, will this training be successful? To a degree maybe, but not completely. Not every employee works on Tuesdays from 5:30-8:30. Will Starbucks make it mandatory for all their employees to be there that day? Probably not, the best they can do is to fill in the people who aren’t there with a summary of the lessons.
If you don’t travel much this next part won’t be much of a concern but how do the high up people in Starbucks plan to make training the same throughout their stores? I didn’t hear anything about who will train or how they will do it. In order to standardize quality for people who travel, the training between stores needs to be the same.
Maybe this re-training day will help improve some of Starbuck’s quality concerns. Most likely it will not though because in many cases the stores employ teenagers who do not care much about their job. What will make the employees care more now about quality and service when they did not care when they started the job?
Fortunately for me, I prefer the cheaper and tastier Dunkin Donuts coffee.
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Respectfully,
Adam
Many people throw out that employees of places are "teens who don't care." It has been my experience that most people will strive to provide at least some sense of quality for customers regardless of the workers age (I have worked 11 different service industry jobs since turning 14, six years ago). Even on the last days for many disgruntled teen who were "fed up" with their jobs, the kids provided good service to customers.
Furthermore, a refresher course in service can do tons to help. At one of my places of employment sales and customer satisfaction was at it's highest in the month directly after employee refresher trainings.
I know it is a generalization when I say teens who don't care, and I don't know where you are from and that locations vary, but where I am from I have seen a lot of teens who don't care. I have seen teens walk out of the job, and give lousy customer service. Cashiers at grocery stores (and I am refering to the teens) around my house are both unfriendly and are more interested in socializing with their coworkers than helping the customer. I have friends who work at Dunkin Donuts who would steal product and intentionally mess up the customer's order because they could and it didn't matter to them if the customer was satisfied. So granted some teens do actually care about their job and work hard. I would like to believe I am one of them. But at the same time I know many teens (at least in my area) do not care about their job.
I think that when you train somebody there is a slight decrease in the quality of the product as no one can acutately copy another person unless you have the will to do it exactly how they do it, but that just improves the probability of change in the day to day... coffe making in this case. I think a lot of the lack of quality is due to what you say, young teens not realy caring how starbucks quality is, just that they get a check every week or two. The re-training is a pretty awesome statement by...howard schultz did you say?
I know that the corperation I work for could use a going over, not just for training purposes( though we need a intensive training session),but to re-evaluate staffing and protocols. I can see quite a few ways customer sevice could be improved just by allowing greater freedom as to sevices we are allowed to offer to guests and allowing us to customize our services to better suit our region. The main problem is, as you pointed out, that they need to train someone right the first time. Managers have to do that though, so the overtime hours that they get ( and they get salary so they dont count as overtime)are so wearing that they just stick whoever is capable enough to still make income but not effectivly or efficiently on the position even when they are not completly satisfactory.
Companys need to have a specific training agent that travel around to do the training to make sure that things are uniform, but also to have the athourity and the good sense it takes to decide when adaptations need to be made in order to provide ultimate customer satisafaction.
It's about time businesses focus on quality more than quantity