Starbucks had included a store locator on its starbucks.com Web site since 1999. But the service, maintained on a separate Web site by an outside vendor, was slow and expensive to update, and it lacked flexibility. So, Starbucks migrated to the Microsoft® MapPoint® Web Service to take advantage of MapPoint driving directions, route maps and international coverage. In addition, Starbucks now has the flexibility to add new features including new searchable categories such as store amenities, whenever it wants, without expense and delay. Because Starbucks hosts the store locator application itself, it can easily extend it to support other corporate marketing objectives, such as an annual community service campaign, Starbucks gift card and T-Mobile HotSpot Service Internet hot spots. Current and future location-based development is fast and easy and continues to drive down total cost of ownership.

Situation

Starbucks.com is the Web site of Starbucks Coffee Company, the world’s largest retailer and roaster of specialty coffee in the world. Millions of customers—25 million, to be precise—visit the company’s stores each week. But in order to do so, many of them first visit starbucks.com to locate the nearest store. The store locator service, added to the site in 1999, is one of the most popular services on starbucks.com, and the most popular page on the site after the home page itself.

MapPoint-driven location templates are offered as a la carte Web site building blocks to country market partners as we open up new operations in countries like the U.K. and Greece. MapPoint has cut our IT costs to virtually zero compared to an average expense of $30,000 per country. This year we’ll likely save upwards of $240,000. Rob Reed Director of Web Services, Starbucks

Using the store locator service hasn’t always been easy for Starbucks or for its customers. Initially, its provider managed the starbucks.com store locator service as a separate Web site at its own site. That meant starbucks.com was actually operating from two sites, a model that lacked flexibility, according to Rob Reed, Director of Web Services for Starbucks.

“When we wanted to make changes to our store locator site, it could take two or three weeks,” Reed said. “And it was completely out of our control. We had to hire the vendor, at added expense, to make each change we wanted.”

The lack of integration with its own site cost Starbucks in several ways. When a customer moved from starbucks.com to the store locator site, Starbucks lost the tracking data for that customer’s visit, as well as any personalization data the customer may have provided in response to targeted promotions. When the company wanted to set up store-locator-based Web sites for other purposes, such as promotion of its month-long “Make Your Mark” community service campaign, it had to redo its development effort from scratch. Driving instructions were difficult to provide. Nor was it easy for Starbucks to add new categories of information—for example, stores with wireless access or stores with drive-through windows—or leverage its relationship with strategic partners by, for example, showing the location of partner stores near Starbucks locations.

Solution

To solve these problems, Starbucks migrated its starbucks.com store locator feature to the Microsoft® MapPoint® Web Service, an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based Microsoft .NET Web service. In contrast to the separate, vendor-based site on which starbucks.com had relied for store locator services, Starbucks now provides the store locator services to its customers directly and those customers never have to leave the starbucks.com site, as they did before. Starbucks hosts starbucks.com, including the MapPoint-based store locator service, on four load balanced Compaq ProLiant DL 380 servers running Microsoft Windows® 2000 Advanced Server with the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.0 and Microsoft Commerce Server 2002. When customers hit starbucks.com, a link on the home page brings them to the store locator page where they can request a proximity search for all stores within a specific radius. Visitors can also search for stores meeting any of nine criteria, such as locations with wireless access, lunch offerings or a drive-through window. Because the MapPoint locator service is hosted by Starbucks and is always under its control, the company can easily expand or modify these criteria to meet its changing needs.

We cut our development time and cost by 20 percent, so customers were able to start benefiting quickly from the MapPoint Web Service. And as we extend our store locator with new features and use it to support other projects at Starbucks, we can cut the time to benefit for those extensions, as well. Evan Klopp Solutions Architect, Starbucks

When the customer makes the request, the MapPoint Web Service goes out over the Internet to MapPoint servers hosted by Microsoft, which host store data provided previously (and updated weekly) by Starbucks. The MapPoint servers identify stores meeting the customer’s criteria and return that data to starbucks.com in industry-standard Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and XML format. Starbucks.com then renders the data in HTML and presents it as a Web page to the customer. Because all the rendering is done at starbucks.com, the company can easily update the page display to match graphics and content elsewhere on the site.

The customer can then request and obtain driving directions and a route map for any of the identified stores, with the MapPoint Web Service again working in cooperation with MapPoint servers at Microsoft. The driving instructions and route-map functionality were not readily available with Starbucks’ previous store locator service.

In addition to requesting all stores (or those matching specific criteria) within a given radius, visitors to the starbucks.com store locator also can request a list of stores in a given state. This request is fulfilled not by a Web service call to the MapPoint servers, but by a Microsoft SQL ServerTM 2000 call to a copy of the store database located directly on starbucks.com.

Benefits

Integration, Extensibility to Support Marketing Programs and Future Flexibility

“With the MapPoint Web Service as the engine for our store locator service, we can easily leverage location services to support our marketing programs—and that wasn’t the case with our previous store locator service,” Reed said. “The flexibility to make changes cost-effectively because we host the service at starbucks.com, and simply send updated data to MapPoint is a tremendous benefit.”

The MapPoint Web Service allows starbucks.com customers to find stores meeting criteria devised by Starbucks, including “Wireless HotSpot Stores,” “Lunch Available” and “Drive Through Window.”

With the MapPoint Web Service, Starbucks gains the flexibility to use its store locator service to support other programs at the company. For example, Starbucks is able to use the existing service to support a separate Web site for its “Make Your Mark” community service campaign. In the past, the company would have had to develop an entirely new store locator service to support the program.

“The beauty of the MapPoint Web Service is that it puts the store locator function entirely under our control,” Reed said. “It’s easy to expand its use to accommodate other purposes with very little development effort.”

What does an innovative company like Starbucks have in mind for future uses of MapPoint Web Service? Reed explains:

“We are getting customer requests for new kinds of location-oriented searches,” said Reed. “For example, trip-planning requests such as where Starbucks stores are located off a major freeway or store-hours searches to accommodate early morning and late night customers. We’ll be looking at potentially adding these and other features in the future as MapPoint makes offering new search options quite painless.”

When customers click on one of the stores identified for them by the MapPoint-based store locator, they get full information on the store’s facilities, as well as the option to request driving instructions and a route map.

“MapPoint Web Service has played an important role in our overall strategy of encouraging patrons to linger longer at our stores,” said Reed. “If they can more easily find a particular store and amenity, it not only affects how long they stay, it’s also incredibly helpful in building the value of our worldwide brand.”

The overall business value that MapPoint Web Service and Microsoft MapPoint 2004 have delivered to Starbucks is summed up by director of Web services, Rob Reed: “MapPoint is playing a vital support role at Starbucks. It dovetails extremely well with our various existing corporate marketing programs and gives us a hint at directions we might like to go in the future.”

Better Customer Service Contributes to Lower TCO; Services Searches Soar

“The store locator is one of the most popular features on starbucks.com,” Reed said. “So we had to get it right in order to provide superb service to our customers. With the MapPoint Web Service, we do. The service scales to meet our needs without any problem.

“In addition to delivering fast, flawless performance, the MapPoint Web Service enables starbucks.com to deliver customer service so good, it actually cuts costs to the company. In the past, requests for driving directions were one of the top three reasons that customers called the company’s customer service phone line. With driving directions and route maps available through MapPoint, those calls have virtually dropped off our radar screen,” Reed said.

Over the last six months, the use of the Starbucks.com Web site store and services locator has soared. What the company found

Driving instructions and a route map are new capabilities that starbucks.com was able to add by migrating its store locator service to the MapPoint Web Service.

“One of the Web site surprises was the jump in locator searches for store services such as Internet access and grab and go sandwiches,” said Reed. “It’s climbed 20-30 percent in the last six months. The ability to deliver both store and services location information to Web visitors is very important to us.”
“One of the added benefits of having store locator capabilities on our Web site is helping customers find alternative Starbucks locations,” said Reed. “New stores opened with retail partners like Barnes & Noble and Albertsons offer great options for patrons in neighborhoods and business areas alike.”

Rapid Deployment of Location-Based Web Templates Will Save Starbucks an Estimated $240,000 This Year in International IT Costs

Another key benefit of using Microsoft MapPoint Web Service, Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 and associated development tools is the ability to create store and service location templates that can be used by new Starbucks stores to build their Web sites. This rapid solution development is particularly beneficial internationally.

“MapPoint-driven location templates are offered as a la carte Web site building blocks to country market partners as we open up new operations in countries like the U.K. and Greece,” said Reed. “MapPoint has cut our IT costs to virtually zero compared to an average expense of $30,000 per country. This year we’ll likely save upwards of $240,000.”

Fast, Easy Development Means Short Wait to See Benefits

Migrating the starbucks.com store locator service to the MapPoint Web Service was a relatively straightforward process completed in a few weeks, according to Evan Klopp, Solutions Architect at Starbucks. First, existing store location data was geo-coded for the MapPoint servers and uploaded to them. Then, MapPoint code was integrated into the existing code base of starbucks.com, using the MapPoint Software Development Kit (SDK), the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2002 and Visual C#® development tool. Microsoft Consulting Services provided an assist to ensure that starbucks.com got its new store locator up and running quickly.

“We had experience with [Microsoft] .NET-connected technology, so there wasn’t much of a learning curve,” Klopp said. “The integration between Visual Studio .NET and the Web service made calling the service easy. With Microsoft APIs [application programming interfaces] and tools, such as [Microsoft] IntelliSense®, we cut our development time and cost by 20 percent, so customers were able to start benefiting quickly from the MapPoint Web Service. And as we extend our store locator with new features and use it to support other projects at Starbucks, we can cut the time to benefit for those extensions, as well.”

Microsoft MapPoint
Microsoft MapPoint is the preferred choice for platforms, applications, and services that deliver precise mapping, map-related content, and tools. Microsoft MapPoint helps businesses increase their efficiency and build strategic value with solutions that make it easy to locate customers and competitors, analyze trends, and evaluate risks and opportunities. For developers, Microsoft MapPoint supports a variety of programming environments, includes options for Web-based services, and offers tools that speed the development of location-based applications. In addition, Microsoft MapPoint delivers solutions that integrate location data into business applications, ease the task of address searches, and include options for remote devices.

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