Starbucks engaged RAIN to develop a voice-first ecosystem that encourages users to preorder easier than ever before
We’ve all been there. Blurry-eyed and in need of coffee, we enter our neighborhood Starbucks only to be greeted by a line that’s busting out the back. Beyond being an annoyance, it’s also a huge business problem. During peak times, Starbucks loses as much as 20% of business simply because the line’s too long. Not ideal.
To help combat this problem, RAIN developed a voice-first ecosystem that encourages users to preorder easier than ever before. By looking through existing behaviors, we uncovered a cornerstone insights: 73% of users order the same thing every visit. Rather than force users to go through a multi-screen process, users could simply say "order my regular." That required helping them re-architect their product APIs to better support conversational experiences, laying the foundation for the most transformative future touchpoint: voice in the car.
“In terms of conversational experts, I would only hire RAIN. They are ahead of everyone else in the space”
Leigh Anne Dunkin
Former Director of Emerging Technologies, Starbucks
higher monthly cart-size than non-voice shoppers.
Users who ordered through voice in-app often stopped pressing buttons, defaulting to voice for all interactions.
Voice is becoming the preferred input mechanism for all things mobile (30% of mobile search is being done through voice).
Crawl. Walk. Run. This is often a good way to think about building voice experiences. With Starbucks, the road to the car was built on a single feature.
What is the biggest friction point for your brand?
What is the smallest element of that problem?
Observer
The growing smart speaker market is only the tip of the iceberg.
The Verge
Over the last couple of years, Starbucks has been finding new ways to make it easier for customers to order their drinks with its mobile phone app. If you use Amazon’s Alexa, you can now place an...
