Starbucks officials are very excited with the reception of Mobile Order & Pay, and expect the complete rollout to all of its 7,400 U.S. stores by the end of September. It has raised customer engagement levels significantly, according to CFO Scott Maw, who spoke at the Goldman Sachs Global Retailing Conference on Sept. 10.
“What we’re seeing around Mobile Order & Pay is we’re seeing incrementality broadly across all the store types, and we’re seeing increased incrementality and increased overall metrics as we roll different waves, so every wave is stronger than the one before and I think that’s due to the fact that we’re getting a little bit better operationally on how to execute this,” Maw said, according to Seeking Alpha. “In our busiest stores at peak, if you take the 20% busiest stores that we have, we’re seeing significantly more incrementality and significantly more transactions from a Mobile Order & Pay. On the customer point it’s really important. As you can imagine, we measure customer satisfaction across a number of dimensions all the time. But pre-Mobile Order & Pay we can measure customer satisfaction in those stores just before it launches, then we can measure it afterward and there is a significant uptick due to Mobile Order & Pay.”
Maw said that Starbucks is still in the “early innings” when it comes to analytics connected to 1-to-1 marketing and related partnerships.
“My Starbucks Rewards has been around for a while and it’s been successful for a while,” Maw explained. “We have 30% of our transactions that are on My Starbucks Rewards so I think we have tremendous momentum there. The real opportunity is how do we get to the next stage. If you look at the 1-to-1 marketing, the improvements that we’ve driven really under Matt Ryan’s leadership since he’s come in from Disney over the last couple of years in harnessing the data, being much quicker and much more segmented and specific in how we market to different groups of customers, much quicker in integrating the feedback we get from those marketing efforts. Updating and tweaking the analytics and then making a new offer, all of that is significantly better than it was a couple of years ago, but I would say we’re in the early innings, maybe second inning there.”