Executive Summary
The purpose of this case study report is to examine the effect that a Mobile Payment and
Reward Card Smartphone Application (App) has on the service offering of Starbucks Coffee Company in the US market. In particular this report will examine the effect of the App on Starbucks’ customer relationship, the challenges to customer relationship and future recommendations. Starbucks is global retailer of coffee and beverages. It is has its headquarters in USA and has implemented a couple of loyalty programmes to gain customer loyalty. One recent customer relation management is the introduction of square mobile system. A smart phone app that allows customers make wireless payment and gain loyalty rewards.
Square Mobile Payment CRM Implementation By Starbucks Corporation
Introduction
Starbucks was founded in the 1970s, opened their first coffee shop in Seattle’s Pike place in 1971 and by 1987 it had expanded its branches into Chicago and Canada. In 1988 Starbucks began mail-order sales of their products. Today Starbucks is in the business of selling hot and cold beverages, complementary food items, coffee-related accessories and equipment, teas and other non-food products through retail stores in 37 countries. In order to boost sales and gain customer loyalty Starbucks have been reported to have initiated a couple of CRM strategies one of which is the adoption of square mobile payment application.
Customer relationship management is part of a the marketing strategies of an organization. It is built on the ideals that that businesses can attract and retain more customers. It follows the logical assumption that t more customers leads to high revenues for the business. CRM is also advantageous in that it is easy and less expensive to retain existing clients than to acquire new ones. Rosenfied (2002) posits that effective management of customer information enables companies gin customer loyalty with leads to competitive advantage and profits....