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Xpress Co-creation

In a business case competition we were involved in recently, our team was asked to solve a “hypothetical” problem which the almighty Starbucks faced. The problem centred on customer service and the inability of the company to produce a wide range of customised products in a timely manner. The solution we proposed revolves around co-creation of value.

Our Starbucks Xpress solution enabled customers to create their own unique coffee suited perfectly to their individual taste, in a fraction of the time. The customer orders a base coffee (i.e. a cappuccino) which can be produced quickly by trained staff, then moves on to the self service customisation station to add their favourite extras such as syrup, cream, cinnamon, chocolate etc.

The customer gets their coffee quickly, they can make it exactly to suit their taste, and time spent waiting in lines is cut considerably. The customer wins, Starbucks win; and subsequently value is (co) created. Brilliant!

If this sounds somewhat familiar, then like me you may have noticed Starbucks have actually started implementing co-creation stations to some extent…

On a recent stopover at Hong Kong airport when grabbing a jet-lag busting caffeine injection I was surprised to see something that replicated our service bottleneck solution. It wasn’t quite what we had envisaged during the case competition but it was a step in the right direction. The beauty of this set-up is the potential it had to alleviate the obvious time pressures and language barriers faced in an international airport.

Simple co-creation solutions like Starbucks Xpress can be dreamt up in no time and create value without being overly complicated. For the record the judges liked the idea so much we went on to win the case competition. Go us!

We would love to hear any other good (or bad) examples of co-creation in action.