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I have a complicated relationship with the Starbucks story right now. On the one hand, I’ve spent 25 years holding it up as one of the greatest customer-experience organizations ever built. I helped create its Customer Experience Action Statement. I’ve written about it, spoken about it, and used it as the gold standard in nearly every keynote I’ve ever given.
On the other hand, watching what happened to Starbucks over the past several years was genuinely painful for me because I could see exactly why it was happening, and it was entirely preventable.
Starbucks spent years optimizing for efficiency and scale at the direct expense of the human experience. Mobile ordering exploded. Wait times ballooned. The barista who used to know your name became a person desperately fulfilling a queue. The cozy “third place” between home and work became a chaotic pickup counter. The focus on rapid mobile fulfillment shifted the atmosphere away from what had made Starbucks irreplaceable.
Customers noticed. Same-store sales dropped. Traffic declined for seven consecutive quarters.
When Starbucks’ board members brought in Brian Niccol as CEO in September 2024, they were hiring someone to do the hardest thing in business: remind an organization of what it was always supposed to be.
His “Back to Starbucks” strategy is built on something I’ve believed my entire career: You cannot out-innovate a broken culture. You have to fix the foundation first.
Niccol simplified store metrics to five: customer experience, performance during peak hours, employee scheduling, product availability, and health and safety. He reintroduced handwritten names on cups. He restored seating that had been removed to make room for mobile order staging. He said publicly, “If you don’t like customer service, you’re probably not going to like working at Starbucks.” And according to Starbucks’ investor communications, customers are describing stores as “places of comfort, familiarity, and joy” again.
Here’s the question I often get asked: How do I get my team to deliver the experience I want?
Excellent customer experience must start at the top of the hierarchy. Not with training. Not with policy. With the leader. Your team watches what you do, what you prioritize, what you celebrate, and what you let slide.
For years, Starbucks’ leadership signaled that speed was the priority. They never said, “Stop caring about customers.” But the signals they sent shaped the culture at 17,000 stores. Baristas optimized for speed, not connection.
Niccol’s first move was to visit dozens of stores to talk to baristas and customers. He modeled what mattered.
The Starbucks decline happened because of dozens of individually reasonable decisions that collectively drifted the organization away from its core identity. Mobile ordering made sense. Operational efficiency made sense. Menu expansion made sense. But nobody was asking the most important question: What is all of this doing to the experience we promised our customers?
That’s the trap I see leaders fall into constantly. They’re making good business decisions while slowly eroding the thing that made their business worth choosing in the first place.
Whether you’re running a coffee chain or a law firm, the principle is the same. Here’s how I advise leaders to model the experience they want their teams to deliver:
The “Back to Starbucks” turnaround is working because the brand remembered what it was and rebuilt the experience from the inside out, starting with leaders who were willing to be personally accountable for the culture they’d allowed to erode.
Every business I’ve ever worked with that struggled with inconsistent service, high turnover, or declining customer loyalty had one thing in common: a gap between what leadership said they valued and what leadership actually modeled. Closing that gap is not a training initiative. It’s a personal commitment.
The question isn’t whether you have a Customer Experience Action Statement. The question is whether your team sees you living it every single day and whether your decisions, your metrics, and your presence make it unmistakably clear that it’s not optional.
John DiJulius III, author of The Customer Service Revolution, is president of The DiJulius Group, a customer service consulting firm that works with companies, such as Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Ritz-Carlton, Nestle, PwC, Lexus, and many more. Contact him at 216-839-1430 or info@thedijuliusgroup.com.