How They Measure: Starbucks Drive-Thru Customer Experience
What The Metrics Tell Us About Company Priorities
Why these metrics matter
70% of Starbucks’ orders come from drive-thrus. This large percentage was caused by Starbucks’ shift to focus on drive-thru and mobile orders over in-store customers. In the US, where most people across the country prefer the convenience of staying in their car, this shift was a huge success!
In 2021, drive-thru orders helped Starbucks propel sales back to pre-pandemic levels. Starbucks also aims to build 60% of new stores with a drive-thru with hopes to catch up to coffee competitors like Dunkin Donuts and McDonalds.
What’s measured
Store # is a unique identifier assigned to each of 16000 US locations, not all of which may have drive-thrus. The metrics panels pictured below is from a store outside of Los Angeles.
Daypart is a multiple-hour section of the day used to estimate mealtimes like breakfast, lunch, and dinner across the food industry. Roughly divided into early morning (3–7am), late morning (7–11am), afternoon (11am-3pm), evening (3-7pm), night (7-11pm). Many stores will be open for the full period of each daypart. For example, my local Starbucks is open from 5:30am-10pm.
Wait Time is how many minutes each car has been at each step in line (OrderPt, Window1). Changes color from green (good) to orange (bad) minutes.
Number of total cars in line represented by the car symbols.
Half Hour Transactions is the number of transactions / orders completed at the drive-thru in the last 30min window, compared against number from previous 30min and overall best.
Window1% is the number of cars who spend below the good/green threshold minutes at Window1 while paying and receiving their order.
What it means about Starbucks’ priorities
From these metrics, we can estimate that Starbucks is measuring customer satisfaction based on wait time (time between arriving at OrderPt and leaving Window1).
We can also assume that they are measuring employee performance based on their speed (Half Hour Transactions) and percentage of customer cars with “satisfactory experience” (Window1 %).
Starbucks corporate also likely tracks trends in number of customers, wait times, and sizes of orders over different times of the day (DayPart) and across stores (Store #). These trends can help Starbucks identify high-demand regions for more stores, predict customer volume to schedule additional baristas, adjust menu offerings or dynamic surge pricing based on dayparts, and even improve external advertisement placement to areas in the drive-thru line where cars spend more time.
While Starbucks restaurants in Europe still offer ceramic mugs for dine-in customers, American Starbucks locations are shifting the responsibility for sustainability onto their customers to bring their own reusable cup. This saves them time and resources required to wash mugs, could allow them to sell more in-store merchandise, and still meet corporate sustainability goals.
How it might change…
In January 2024, Starbucks announced that it will allow customers to use their own clean, reusable cup for drive-through orders, a policy that was re-introduced for in-store purchases in June 2021. Bringing a reusable cup saves users a $.10 in the US and Canada.
We can imagine that waiting to make drinks for the customer to arrive at the payment window and hand the worker their reusable cup might cause a negative trend in wait times, and then in worker evaluation.
So, during Daypart 5, I took a trip to my local Starbucks. I ordered a Strawberry Acai Lemonade in my reusable cup, and asked the barista about their experience filling drive-thru orders with reusable cups:
“Many people bring their reusable cups, even in the drive-thru. It can take a bit longer and it can get stressful in the morning rush. But at a time like this, I don’t have to think about meeting the metrics.”
Next time you visit a Starbucks store, take a peek at the metrics boards.
Do they reflect your experience as a customer?
