Starbucks

A common assignment on Starbucks is as follows:

Requirements for Starbucks Term Paper:

1. Assess their commitment (including corporate culture and storefront) to and understanding of the concepts of continuous quality improvement, customer satisfaction, quality evaluation, and service blueprinting - more specifically:

• Highlight each operators (ie including employees/managers within store) commitment to quality management (mission statement etc.).
• Identify the reasoning behind their current quality drive.
• The aims and objectives of their quality program.
• Any policies and practices they may have initiated in pursuit of these goals and problems encountered along the way.
• Approach to involving staff and customers in their quality drive.
• Approach to measuring success.
• The consequences, both operational and strategic, for the organization and customers alike.

2. Then blueprint/flowchart the service delivery system (from storefront perspective)

• A useful starting point in this respect is Dr. Colin Armistead's paper entitled: Customer Service and Operations Management in Service Businesses, The Service Industries Journal, Vol. 9 No 2. pp. 247-260. This will also serve as a useful framework when it comes to preparing the paper.

3. Also include a significant literature review (not exceeding 2000 words) on the broad quality issue, its importance and relevance, its measurement and the advantages and disadvantages of using the mystery shopping technique to assess it. Naturally, this should also contain a section on the use of blueprinting as a diagnostic improvement technique. Please also include a methods section addressing the research undertaken and problems encountered.
It is a mix of using Starbucks experience with the research literature applicable to Starbucks specifically - as well as a general literature review on quality as a whole.