Why Starbucks' App Caused Long Lines

Once eateries introduce mobile apps, their customer visit rate increases by 6%, according to Deloitte's 2014 Consumer Review. The key obstacle, however, is to convince customers to use the app on a regular basis. Starbucks, with its huge brand popularity, was one of the first to succeed: welcoming 13 million users, the company increased its annual revenue in 2016 by 7% with its app.

Yet, the mobile pre-order app ended up being too successful. Customers flocked to Starbucks to pick up their pre-ordered food and drink, only to find long lines. Meanwhile, in-store customers became frustrated that mobile app users were jumping the queue, further extending the in-store wait time.

Starbucks will come up with a solution, no doubt. But could they have seen the problem coming and prevented it?

This article analyzes the challenges experienced by Starbucks and offers tips for planning a mobile pre-ordering solution for cafes and restaurants.

What happened with Starbucks’ app?

Initially, Starbucks hoped that mobile pre-ordering would help most of its stores get rid of long lines. However, in Q1 2017 the number of stores that were struggling to manage the customer traffic doubled from 600 to 1,200. The reason is ironic: customers who made pre-orders through the app and jumped the line ended up creating a line of their own.

The additional lines increased the wait time for customers who placed orders in real-time. Frustrated walk-in customers started to leave as soon as they saw a crowd at the counter.

Although sales didn’t plunge, the situation cast a shadow on Starbucks’ brand image and customer service reputation, both of which are the basis of Starbucks’s business success.

3 Steps for a Better Mobile Pre-Order Solution

With the introduction of its app, Starbucks proved that mobile technology is a powerful tool that influences customer behavior. However, when rolling out an app, it is important for a business to consider its operational capabilities, customers’ needs, and the technological features necessary for an app to be used smoothly.

In other words, it takes careful balancing to deliver impact through mobile technologies and to avoid public backlash.

The following three-step plan will help you implement a mobile pre-order solution. It seems that Starbucks considered most, but not all, of these steps.

1. Win Mobile App Users with Superb Functionality

People are used to treating their mobile devices as personal belongings and are very picky with the apps they install.

To ensure users choose your app, the user interface and user experience (UI/UX) quality should be impeccable.

Push notifications and first month discount reminders should be there too; otherwise, the app will be abandoned from the start.

Also, consider that some customers avoid using mobile pre-order apps because they fear their food won’t be fresh or warm once they arrive to pick it up.

To address this concern, a business should educate its customers about how an app’s GPS features assure food is fresh by tracking customers’ distance from the store when they place an order.

2. Physically Separate Pre-Order & Order Services

The idea of valuing mobile orders over real-time ones disrupts the “first-come, first-served” ideology and is wrong at its very core.

At specific times of the day – during lunch or evening hours, as well as on weekends – mobile orders roll in rapidly, making it difficult for employees to process real-time orders. This is what happened with Starbucks. Therefore, it is necessary for a business to have a plan for how to prioritize pre-order and order services before rolling out an app.

One solution is to separate pre-order and order services. A separate area for mobile orders is an additional investment but a necessary condition for additional revenue streams and brand integrity.

Equipped with a system for taking mobile orders, this separate area would be connected to other stores' systems.

Integration across chains would prevent restaurants from making mistakes, such as processing two orders, when in reality, there’s only one item on the menu left, or booking the same table for two separate customers.

3. Incorporate Time Saving Features in Apps’ Backend

Increasing the staff at the counter is one way to deal with a large crowd. However, this may work for Starbucks (or another worldwide corporation) but not for smaller businesses with less resources.

Instead, the backend of a pre-order app should have special algorithms that control the workload. For example, when pre-order lunch, a client would be asked to choose from a series of available time slots for order pickup.

Time slot availability would constantly be updated, disabling pickup times when the number of pre-orders exceeded the load a store can manage without causing trouble with real-time orders.

For example, Sweetgreen, a creative salad company, allows pre-order users to select when they want to pick up their meal.

Time slots disappear based on how long it takes employees to assemble a salad. For example, you may not be able to pre-order a salad at 12 PM and pick it up at 12:05 PM. The turnaround time is too quick.

If a customer wants to get their order sooner than the app allows, an apology message could appear, asking them to place the order in the store instead. Additionally, if the store is overloaded, the app could offer free or discounted delivery or invite them to a nearby, less crowded location.

Successful Pre-Order Mobile Apps Require Planning

Just like any useful and powerful tool, mobile apps for pre-ordering at cafes and restaurants can bring profit only if well-planned by a mobile app development consulting team and then kept under control by the company’s IT management.

To avoid the problems that Starbucks faced, it’s important to think about your entire mobile app strategy: the app’s functionality (including push notifications and reminders), integration with the internal order processing system, and the way pre-orders are handled by stores (GPS tracking, automated time slot choice, a separate mobile-order desk).

Anastasia Yaskevich

Anastasia Yaskevich is an Enterprise Mobility Researcher at ScienceSoft, a software development and consulting company headquartered in McKinney, Texas. She started out in IT with research on cloud computing and UI design and now writes on mobile technology and mobile design trends. With her interest in psychology and experience in managing employee satisfaction surveys, Anastasia taps into HR-related technologies and overviews the concepts of mobile HRM applications.