"The company is not in touch with reality." This is how Starbucks' system works to evaluate its staff

By Louise Matsakis and Eli M. Rosenberg -

International coffee chain Starbucks uses popular origin ratings, known as connection scores, to assess customer service at its locations across the country. 

Seventeen company employees and five former Starbucks employees told our sister network NBC News that the previously unreported system made them feel powerless and at the mercy of customers' whims.

In two cases, workers said low scores prompted managers to reduce the hours of certain store employees.

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Although the scores have been used for years, many workers said the connection scoring system has also helped fuel a national labor organizing campaign now underway at Starbucks.

Since last December, employees at more than 80 of the company's roughly 9,000 U.S. locations have voted to unionize, a move the White House has applauded and has helped galvanize other labor efforts.

“It's a good sign that associates feel the company is out of touch with the reality of the job

,” said Maddie Vanhook, a Starbucks coffee shop worker in Cleveland who unionized this week.

“It's just about serving drinks.

I think a lot of people get into a rut.

But then somewhere in your head, if you don't say hello to everyone or have a little chat with everyone in between all this rush and noise and other stuff that's going on, it's going to affect my store numbers." he pointed.

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Most of the workers revealed to NBC News that they would not be penalized financially if their cafeteria's score was low.

But three current and two former Starbucks employees said they remembered their managers threatening to cut staff hours if their stores didn't improve ratings.

Two workers said their bosses carried out the plan, resulting in lost income for some workers.

Reggie Borges, a spokesman for Starbucks, repeatedly denied that the scores influence the number of staff hours a store receives, which he said are based on factors such as customer traffic and sales volume.

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But he also said the scores with customers reflect the company's priorities for its workers, whom it calls partners. 

"It's an important number and it matters to us because we are a company built on the idea that the connection a customer and a partner have in a store is the differentiator for us compared to other companies," he said.

"People come to Starbucks for the experience," he added.

Starbucks Coffee Supervisor Maddie Vanhook holds Starbucks Workers United pins in Cleveland on May 19. Amber N. Ford/NBC News

Beyond the baristas

In the past decade, companies have begun asking customers to rate the performance of retail workers, restaurant servers, pharmacists, doctors, and call center representatives.

Similar systems are used by job-for-hire platforms like Uber, Lyft and DoorDash, which, unlike Starbucks, say they directly penalize individual workers whose qualifications fall below acceptable thresholds.

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Legal experts say the trend is transforming the relationship between clients and service employees, giving clients a more supervisor-like role.

They are concerned that by using feedback collected through online surveys, companies may be unwittingly allowing their customers' gender and racial biases to influence their workforce management, which could amount to discrimination. 

“Customer reviews are notoriously unreliable and discriminatory

, particularly against women and people of color,” said Dallan Flake, a law professor at Ohio Northern University who has written about customer reviews.

"Despite this, companies are increasingly relying on them to make employment-related decisions, such as promotions, layoffs, and wage rates," he noted.

Starbucks Cafe Supervisor Maddie Vanhook shows an example of the scores with customers from the last eight weeks. Amber N. Ford / NBC News

Borges noted that the scores are just one of the signals that Starbucks uses to evaluate the performance of its stores.

He said the company is aware that the demographics of its staff can influence scores, and encourages store managers to focus on improvement over time rather than comparisons with other stores.

He added that the company's diversity and inclusion team works closely with the teams responsible for creating materials such as customer surveys.

scores

Starbucks calculates the scores by collecting email surveys sent to a sample of customers who are part of its rewards program, which the company says has more than 27 million active members in the US.

They are asked to rate a series of questions about their recent experience at Starbucks on a scale of (1) "Strongly Disagree" to (7) "Strongly Agree."

The survey includes questions about the cleanliness of the store and the taste of the drinks, but one is the most relevant to the connection score: "The employees went out of their way to get to know me."

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Perfect scores count toward increasing the metric, according to Starbucks, while anything below 7 is essentially counted as a zero.

For example, if 40 of the 100 people who responded to the survey responded with a 7, the customer connection score at that location would be 40. The scores are updated at the beginning of each week and take into account data from the previous eight weeks. 

Some workers said district directors used to share data on connection scores across the area, so they could see how their location compared to others nearby.

Workers said they were also able to see comments left by customers, which sometimes referred to things beyond the employees' control, such as ingredient shortages.

A former Starbucks worker said his store received about 30 responses a week from more than 6,000 visitors.

Borges said Starbucks couldn't say how many responses were typically included in customer connection scores, but that "stores have a large number."

Studies have repeatedly shown that customer reviews collected online can be biased in different ways.

In many cases, researchers have found that

.

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Reviews can also be influenced by other factors, such as whether customers anticipate being asked for their opinion and their understanding of how negative reviews could hurt a person's livelihood.

Starbucks coffee supervisor Maddie Vanhook, in Cleveland, on May 19, 2022.Amber N. Ford/NBC News

Duel of demands

Heather Weizsacker, a manager at a Starbucks store in Seattle, revealed that she and other managers felt pressured to keep their connection scores high, a concern that trickled down to workers.

"There was a lot of embarrassment for those of us who had low scores," recalled Weizsacker, who went on medical leave in 2020. "Sometimes other managers would even make 'jokes,' very demoralizing."

(Starbucks said that making fun of people is not consistent with its values.)

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Workers said managers often pushed them into conversations with customers that seemed inauthentic to influence ratings.

"It's so fake and depressing," said Cierra Goolsby, 29, a Starbucks worker in Carbondale, Illinois.

“Some people love it.

But it makes me feel weird, trying to meet people without some inviting you to it,” she added.

Casey Moore, a barista in Buffalo, New York, said a manager instructed workers to ask customers a "question of the day," which she hears repeated through her driving headphones up to 60 times an hour.

On Cinco de Mayo, her classmates asked her: “My favorite Mexican food is a burrito.

Which is yours?".

Workers believe that trying to improve their store's score contradicts other requirements Starbucks has put in place, such as serving customers drinks faster at drive-thru windows.

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"It's frustrating because there's a lot of push and pull to focus on speed and volume, but just as broadly, getting us to make these connections with people," explained Olivia Lewis, 30, a Starbucks worker who recently voted. to unionize in Boone, North Carolina.

“That's what we want to do.

We are in the service sector.

she pointed out.

These kinds of demands are part of what worries Keith Cunningham-Parmeter, a professor at Willamette University School of Law, who has just written a paper on client scoring to be published next year. 

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"This is one more point of pressure in the lives of workers," he clarified.

“And at some point you have to ask yourself if something has to give.

Because the mounting pressure combined with low wages, combined with the anguish we're all feeling in the midst of the pandemic, adds up to a fundamental problem of worker burnout," he added.

The lack of control Starbucks employees believed they had over connection scores and other aspects of their workplace was part of what some said made unions attractive.

“We do this so we can fight for everything from working conditions to better health and pay through a collective bargaining agreement,” said Moore, whose Buffalo store voted to unionize earlier this week. (the results of the election are still being finalized).

Joe Thompson, 19, a Starbucks worker in Santa Cruz, California, believes his store's score had gone up because workers had unionized.

“The union brings unity, it makes it easier to work.

We have fun and customers are more supportive,” he explained.

Thompson said he also believed that managers with high scores received bonuses.

When asked if that was the case, Borges, the Starbucks representative, said that "there are a number of factors that go into the reward of all our partners."

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He stressed that connection scores are not intended as a punitive tool, and that Starbucks believes workers must balance efficient service with quality customer interaction. 

"At the end of the day," he said, "we're in the business of people serving coffee."