Improve your experience from Starbucks Chatbot

Shiting Li
3 min readNov 29, 2020

The most pleasant thing is to sit in a relaxing space with hot coffee and read your favorite books. Today, let me tell you about the Chatbot of Starbucks!

What is the Chatbot of Starbucks?

Very simple. Talk to the robot. The AI chatbot program in the Starbucks app allows you to place orders by voice, support natural language, pay by associating a credit or gift card and send a request to a nearby store where customers can pick up their groceries. And this system helps Starbucks’ services more digital.
For Starbucks chatbot, the My Starbucks Barista system offers “unparalleled speed and convenience” and increases customer loyalty and engagement.

What intrigued you about how this brand is using this?

Convenience is a reason what got me interested in Starbucks using chatbots to serve. Why is that?
In a competitive market like coffee, new ways to make the ordering process easier are key to standing out, even for established brands like Starbucks. The company makes it easier to reorder coffee by integrating with Amazon Alexa, which means customers can talk to Amazon Alexa and reorder their favorite drinks. This convenience will allow customers to complete other tasks while they prepare drinks from their application choice location. It will enable customers to stay in their homes’ comfort until their coffee is ready (the robot will send you a message when your order is ready to pick up). The barista robots can also pay and tip, meaning customers need to show up. The app itself also allows customers to be rewarded based on the frequency of store visits. These points can be redeemed at the store for food, drinks, etc.

As a full-time student, Starbucks chatbot’s launch appeals to me very much, especially during the exam period. Especially during the final week, it is convenient and time-saving to order coffee at home.

How did it help achieve marketing objectives?

Starbucks currently has 8 million Mobile payment customers, a third of whom use Mobile Order&Pay. As a result, the robot could make it easier and more comfortable for customers to order and provide a new revenue source for coffee companies.

In the company’s five-year plan, CEO Kevin Johnson revealed, “My Starbucks baristas are powered by groundbreaking artificial intelligence (AI) for Starbucks mobile apps. Customers of Starbucks mobile apps will be able to place orders via voice commands or messaging, providing unmatched speed and convenience, increasing customer loyalty and engagement, and further expanding the accessibility of Starbucks apps.”

The launch of this robot chat system will strike the right balance between convenience and connectivity. Convenience helped Starbucks increase customer loyalty, resulting in a “dramatic increase” in mobile orders and return visits from paying customers. Connectivity allows Starbucks has the opportunity to communicate with customers and understand marketing information in a personalized manner, which means that the brand can learn about customer behavior based on this feedback to provide better products and services.

In a word, I think the emergence of Starbucks chatbot is in line with the current era’s needs. Especially in the current pandemic, chatbots will effectively help customers reduce face-to-face communication opportunities and meet the requirements of controlling the social distance between people. So, I think the chatbot launched by Starbucks will make its service more digital and help Starbucks to take its development to a new level.

--

--

Shiting Li

I’m here as a sharer, reader, thinker. — NYU Grad Student