Sharing a new customer experience at Starbucks™ Reserve Roastery

Milano, 5 June 2019
What Allianz Insurance Agencies could have in common with the new Starbucks Reserve™ Roastery, recently opened in Piazza Cordusio in Milan? Definitely, they both wish to offer their customers the best possible customer experience. For this reason, inside the customized training program “Insurance Agencies Customer Centric Management”, developed by SDA Bocconi for Allianz Agencies to help them rethinking their business model, we brought participants to visit the Milan Starbucks Reserve™ Roastery.

Company visits are one of the teaching methods used to fill the gap between theory and practice in managerial education. In fact, regardless of the teacher’s ability, managerial competencies can hardly transferred only with the traditional teaching methods. Compared to other methods, such as case study, simulations and field projects, company visits are very effective because they allow to:

• Using all the five senses. At the Starbucks Reserve™ Roastery participants had the opportunity to observing, listening, touching, smelling and even tasting coffee. Using all the five senses allows maximizing attention, since all possible channels stimulate it.
• Learning from a best practice of a completely different industry, getting out of the usual patterns and taking completely new suggestions and ideas.
• Through the debriefing after the company visit, thinking carefully about the experience and retaining the most relevant and applicable aspects.
• Reasoning about the possible implementations and how to replicate suggestions and ideas in each own organization.

For all these reasons, company visits usually generate also a high participant’s motivation, in part due to the curiosity for the new experience, in part to the high expectations for the attainable results.

During a company visit usually participants should pay their attention to two elements: the company business model (size, financial performance, customers, products, value proposition, organization, know-how and strengths) and its organizational culture (symbols and core values).   

Located at the historic turn-of-the-century Palazzo Delle Poste building on Piazza Cordusio, Starbucks Reserve™ Roastery embody Starbucks passion for coffee in an unprecedented experience that bring customers on a journey of discovery and closer to coffee than ever before. A homage to the craft of roasting, the art of brewing and exploration of taste, these iconic destinations celebrate Starbucks Reserve® an ultra-premium line of coffees that are among the most rare, limited availability coffees from around the world.

The Milan Reserve™ Roastery represents Starbucks third Reserve Roastery location in the world, following Seattle, which opened in December 2014, and Shanghai, which opened in 2017. Additional Roastery locations have also opened in New York (Dec 2018) and Tokyo (February 2019), and one more planned to open in Chicago later this year. Since 1971, Starbucks Coffee Company has been committed to ethically sourcing and roasting high quality arabica coffee.

For insurance agencies, in order to re-think themselves as small companies, it is mandatory to work on the relationship with actual and prospect customers: the company visit at the Starbucks Reserve™ Roastery provided many ideas to create a new customer experience also in the insurance industry. 

SDA Bocconi School of Management