Customer Experience is Under-Appreciated in Specialty Coffee

I enjoy listening to opinions on coffee shops. Because of a growing interest in customer experience, I’ve become more interested in what normal (read: customers outside of the specialty coffee industry) people have to say about specialty coffee. Additionally, I’m aware that many coffee professionals have expressed disappointment with either their own experiences or the experiences of those close to them at various specialty coffee companies.

The book Outside In offers a fairly straightforward definition of customer experience (CX): it is how customers perceive their interactions with a company.

Good CX design is essential to a cafe’s ability to create and maintain value for customers and grow its customer base. There are many ways to achieve good customer experience — it’s like creating a puzzle. There are pieces that fit together for some businesses that won’t fit for others*. My particular interest in this article is to advance my opinion that excellent CX takes at least one thing that I think many specialty coffee companies lack: designing experiences while truly thinking like customers.

I think there tends to be a large disconnect between how workers in specialty coffee perceive their customers’ coffee experience and what their customers’ experiences actually are. What makes up a good experience will differ between coffee professionals and customers. For example,

• a customer in a hurry has an entirely different perspective on the amount of time it takes to produce a drink. As a barista maybe you felt great about the drink because your espresso pulled according to the dial and your milk textured and poured perfectly. You made a beautiful drink that you know you’d enjoy. You serve it with a smile and thank the customer. How nice. The customer, on the other hand, is definitely late to an important meeting.
• I really love blasting Life of Pablo**— but my customers might find it unwelcomingly loud.
• Your customer is ready to leave and attracts the attention of the entire cafe when she triggers the inevitable crashing of haphazardly-stacked dishes in a too-full dish bin.
• The dish bin is sitting six inches off the floor and everyone leaving has to awkwardly bend over to deposit their dishes.
• Your customer has to get your attention away from your phone to ask a question.
• I’m really stoked that this customer is trying my favorite Kenyan coffee — he’s silently irritated that the last two minutes of his life was filled with me going off about “juiciness, brightness, etc, etc” when he just wants a coffee.

Each of these details in a customer’s experience is a touchpoint — or a point at which a customer interacts with a company’s brand. Customer experience is made up of a series of touchpoints that make up the customer journey. Not every touchpoint will make or break a customer’s experience. Nor will all customers place the same value on each touchpoint. Back to the puzzle analogy: it’s not just important that each piece of the customer experience puzzle fit according to a company’s vision and mission. What is really important is that each piece be designed with the actual customer in mind.

This is what I think is the problem: when specialty coffee companies are designing customer experience, they often do so as if they are the customers. They bring their knowledge and experience to the drawing board that many customers simply do not have (and shouldn’t be expected to have!). Thus, they tend to create experiences that make sense to themselves but may not make sense to their customers.

There is a threshold for how good an experience can be. Thinking like customers raises that threshold because it forces companies to put customers at the center of what they’re doing. The threshold is lowered when we assume that customers will think similarly to coffee professionals. Raising the threshold in turn enables a coffee company to stand out from others and create loyalty and growth.