“We got really focused on trying to be efficient and run it like a manufacturing facility, as opposed to recognizing, no, this is actually a customer service experience, where we do great craft and create great drinks for people on time,” Niccol said.
Early in his tenure, Niccol spoke with customers who lamented the lack of comfortable seating Starbucks locations once had, as well as baristas recognizing and chatting with them. Baristas told Niccol Starbucks should bring back condiment bars to let customers add their own cream and sugar, relieving pressure from workers fulfilling more complicated orders.
“The feedback I heard was, we’ve made the job more complicated than necessary,” Niccol said. “It was one of those things where it’s like, we got to get back to focusing decisions that actually show up in the store, and then you got to understand how those decisions actually are executed in the store.”
At the core of the raft of changes to the Starbucks experience was making the chain as much about customer service as about coffee, Niccol noted.
“f you aren’t working on initiatives that ultimately make the store experience better for our customer and our partner, probably working on the wrong things,” he said.
Starbucks did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
“If you don’t like customer service, you’re probably not going to like working at Starbucks. We’re in that transition of getting people to understand that,” Niccol said. “When I saw that in the Reddit thread, I was like, ‘OK, we’re making progress on what the standard of services that we want [are].’”
