data and analytics have long been known to accelerate Business transformation and growth, but in this digital age where people spend significant time both online and offline it’s imperative that organizations start looking at data in a new way. Data is an incredibly powerful way to connect with people.
We’ve never seen more evidence for this than in 2020. While the pandemic shuttered and disrupted businesses around the world, everyone had to shift many of their real-life activities to the digital world. For brick-and-mortar retailers, it meant that they had to create a way to transition a traditionally in-person experience into a digital experience, while maintaining excellent service and finding ways to still connect in a human-centric way.
As one of the world’s leading brands, Starbucks faced this challenge by turning to their love of data and innovation. The coffeehouses are known for being that friendly place where people connect in communities worldwide, so quickly implementing new ways to serve their customers was paramount for the brand to keep its identity intact. During the pandemic, Starbucks did an incredible job transforming the way they do business in the digital space, discovering several ways to better serve customers while exploring exciting new uses for their data and uncovering opportunities ahead.
At the National Retail Federation’s 2021 Big Show, I’ll talk with Rajesh Naidu, Starbucks VP of Architecture, Data & Analytics Technology, about the company’s incredible transformation and use of data to connect with people. His story of how they leveraged analytics to enhance human connection is one of those amazing cases we love to hear about at Tableau. The future of retail will be meeting customers wherever they are, seamlessly connecting digital and real-life interactions, or as Starbucks calls it, meeting their customers in the ‘third place.’
When COVID-19 hit, Starbucks had to shutter stores for the first time ever and rely on their mobile app and drive-through windows to serve customers. And they needed to do all this while keeping employees safe.
The company quickly turned to data to guide them through these challenges, and it helped them transform the business practically overnight. “The pandemic certainly tested the resolve of our company and how we not only cope during these tough times but also how we reinvent ourselves to be ready for a post-pandemic world,” Naidu told us. “We leveraged data and analytics during these challenging times to take care of our partners, enable our partners to deliver human connection, and deliver upon the safety expectations of our customers, so that we could quickly deliver third place expectations in a changed world.”
This included a significant change in the way Starbucks interacted with customers, including a shift in the morning rush to a steadier flow of all-day orders. The brick-and-mortar experience quickly transformed into one in which customers ordered through a mobile app and safely picked up drinks outside the store, keeping transactions as contactless as possible. They also had to arrange for deliveries.
To enable this digital transformation, Starbucks’ Analytics & Insights and Technology Data & Analytics teams worked together to quickly develop a top line report. Their goal was to deliver the right data points to the right leaders at the right teams to have a holistic view of what was happening in almost real-time. It democratized the data and gave everyone the information they needed to make decisions and move forward.
While the Starbucks team created this new dashboard fast, Naidu said that they made sure not to “cut any corners around user experience.” Following their Azure-first strategy, they migrated multiple data sources to a single location, capturing essential data on sales, channel, product, and more.
