Speech Summaries

Colette Courtion Director, Starbucks Interactive Starbucks

Selling Track: Best Practices Panel: Profitable Customer Retention

Moderator: Kate Delhagen, Research Director, Forrester Research

Amy Curtis-McIntyre, Vice President, Marketing, JetBlue Airways

Scott Key, Senior Director, Marketing, Gap Direct, Gap Inc.

Colette Courtion, Director, Starbucks Interactive, Starbucks

Questions And Answers

Q: How do you create that first great experience?

A: JetBlue: I work for a CEO that has ADD, and it’s great. We can keep going back to him with idea after idea until we get it right. Furthermore, we try to go through all of the same experiences that our customers do to find out what their challenges are, and from there, we’re working to fix and prevent any further mishaps.

Starbucks: From a corporate level, we’re building the tools and services that are necessary make improvements to the daily lives of our customers. We rely on our baristas to deliver these improvements to our customers.

Q: How do you approach customer segmentation?

A: Gap: We primarily look at our customers’ attitudes, product divinities, financials, and lastly demographics. Our database for all of this information is integrated across all three of our brands. However, I think we need to be really good in each of the vertical brands before we can move to more cross-brand selling and marketing.

Starbucks: We segment our “day parts” rather than the entire customer pool. We cater to the needs of the morning customer -- typically a business person in a hurry to get to work -- differently than an evening customer -- possibly a mom grabbing a cup of coffee after dinner.

Q: Service is a lost art: How do you teach, train, and motivate your employees consistently over time?

A: JetBlue: Set the example. Don’t ask people to do something that you wouldn’t do yourself. Our flight attendants have just as much voice within our organization as our pilots do. Also, you hire good people and get rid of the bad ones quickly.

Gap: Bringing quality people into the organization is the first step. After that we do have formal training programs that teach our associates more about our products and reinforce the selling process. We also have a hierarchy of management within our organization. Within each store there are different levels of employees that other associates can turn to with questions or to receive help, like a mentoring program.