Editorial
Research Report
Business Leaders CX Report: What’s Working and What’s Not in AI-Driven CX
The Gist
- It’s never just the product. Customers don’t buy coffee — they buy emotional outcomes, transitions and identity signals tied to the moment.
- Convenience isn’t king. Efficiency alone loses when it strips away rituals, meaning or the emotional payoff customers actually value.
- Experience is the real product. Brands win when they preserve the right friction and consistently deliver the feeling customers return for — not just the functional outcome.
Picture the scene: it is 7:43 in the morning. A woman stands in a Starbucks line. She already made coffee at home. She is holding it in a travel mug. She is still standing in line.
That is the detail most business analyses get wrong. They assume people buy coffee because they need caffeine. They assume Starbucks wins because of brand recognition, or store locations, or a customer loyalty app. They are describing the surface of something they have not looked at closely enough.
People do not choose brands for the reasons companies assume they do. Across years of consumer research, I kept seeing the same pattern: the winning brand was almost never the one with the objectively better product. It was the one that better understood what people were actually trying to accomplish in a specific moment in their lives.
Not what they said they wanted. What they were really doing when they opened their wallet.
Table of Contents
The Job Isn’t Coffee; It’s the Moment
The woman in line at 7:43 is not buying coffee. She is buying a transition. A small, deliberate pause between who she is at home and who she needs to be at the office. The act of standing in line, ordering something with her name on it, holding a warm cup that someone else prepared for her, that sequence is doing psychological work that the coffee in her travel mug cannot do, no matter how good it tastes.
That is the job Starbucks is hired to perform. And it is rarely the same job twice.
Sometimes the job is functional: caffeine, speed, mobile ordering, one fewer decision in a day that is already full of them. But very often the job is emotional. People hire Starbucks to feel momentarily taken care of. To pause without fully stopping. To buy themselves a small, repeatable sense of control in the middle of an overloaded day.
And sometimes the job is about identity, which is one of the most powerful and least discussed forces in consumer behavior. People do not simply consume products. They consume versions of themselves. A Starbucks cup signals something, however subtly: I am the kind of person who has standards, who has rituals, who chooses this kind of experience for myself. The product in the cup was never the whole product. The cup, the name on it, the store design, the music, the smell, the queue, the barista calling your order; all of it is part of what is being sold.
Related Article: Starbucks Comeback Shows What Happens When Customer Experience Leads Again
Why Convenience Alone Fails
One of the more counterintuitive findings from years of consumer research is that convenience alone is consistently overrated. People do not automatically prefer the easiest option. They prefer the option that preserves the right feeling. I have seen products fail not because they solved too little, but because they solved too much and stripped away the emotional payoff that made them desirable in the first place. A product can be more efficient and still lose if it removes a ritual people enjoy, a signal they value or a meaning they attach to the act itself.
This is exactly what Starbucks understood earlier than most. It did not simply remove friction. It removed the right friction while preserving the ceremony. It standardized the experience but kept enough sensory and symbolic texture for the act to feel personal. It turned an everyday purchase into something that felt slightly elevated. Not luxurious, not rare, but just special enough to justify repeating.
Where the Real Value Lives
That is also why the moment the experience stops doing its job, customers notice immediately, even if they cannot articulate why. When the visit becomes too rushed, too transactional, too optimized for throughput, the customer may still get coffee, but the deeper job is no longer being done.
Starbucks itself acknowledged this in late 2024, describing its results as reflecting a challenged customer experience and launching what it called a return to its core identity.
By early 2026, the company was reporting improved comparable sales alongside an all-time high of 35.5 million active Rewards members, generating nearly 60% of U.S. company-operated revenue. Those numbers are not just financially significant. They reveal where the actual value lives: in habit, in belonging, in the quiet emotional utility of something people return to not because they have to, but because it keeps doing something for them that nothing else quite replaces.
Customers do not form loyalty to products in the abstract. They form loyalty to products that consistently help them feel how they want to feel, or move through their day with less internal resistance.
So the question that matters is not whether the coffee is good. A better question is: what role does this brand play in the customer's life that extends far beyond the product itself?
Webinar
Apr
22
Why Your AI Media Stack Is Leaking Revenue — And What Fixes It
Stop layering AI on a broken foundation and start building the operating model that makes every media investment compound.
Register
Webinar
Apr
23
AI for Your DXP: Connect What You Have, Transform How You Work
Most AI strategies stop at the platform—but work happens elsewhere. Bring intelligence into Teams, email, tickets and CRM.
Register
Webinar
Apr
27
Where Contact Center AI Is Actually Headed
A straight read on where the contact center platform market is going and what it means for your next technology decision.
Register
Webinar
May
12
How Marketing Teams Can Take Control of the Web Experience
See how Veo and Kvalifik put marketing in the driver's seat, shipping faster and growing qualified bookings by 150%.
Register
Webinar
May
14
Two Audiences, One WordPress. Is Yours Ready?
The practical steps to making your WordPress portfolio ready for both human visitors and AI agents.
Register
Webinar
May
20
From AI Investment to CX Results: What Enterprise Leaders Need to Know
Move beyond experiments. See how top enterprises scale AI for CX results.
Register
Starbucks answers that question better than almost anyone.
The woman at 7:43 is not irrational. She is not brand-captured. She knows exactly what she is doing. She is buying a pause. A ritual. A bridge between tasks. A small, predictable reward in an unpredictable morning. A familiar script for starting the day on her own terms.
The coffee, in the end, is almost beside the point.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.