{{title}}
{{byline}}
{{byline}}
Too often, when a customer/client decides to stop doing business with a company, things can get ugly. Businesses will point to existing contracts/memberships or lay on guilt trips about how much they have done for their customer over time. All these tactics only confirm to the client that they are making the right decision.
This doesn’t happen at Chewy.com. The brand does the total opposite when it finds out a customer will be terminating their services. When a customer’s beloved dog recently died, she canceled her pet-food membership. Chewy responded by sending a condolence card and a portrait of her dog. The woman put her grateful and teary-eyed response on TikTok where it had received more than 40,000 likes by the end of 2025.
With 70% of sales coming from automatic order refills, it is no surprise that Chewy’s customer service experiences have earned the company one of the highest Net Promoter Scores, consistently in the 80s and 25 points higher than its nearest competition. In 2017, Chewy was acquired by PetSmart for $3.35 billion. At the time, it was the largest-ever acquisition of an e-commerce business.
According to an American Customer Satisfaction Index review of nearly 42,000 consumer surveys, overall customer satisfaction with online retailers fell over the past year. More than two-thirds of online retailers experienced declines in satisfaction compared to the prior retail study. However, Chewy bucked the trend by maintaining the highest overall customer satisfaction among online retailers with a score of 85. Chewy has held the top spot for the past three years.
An online retailer of pet food and other pet-related products, Chewy has become a brand that pet owners can’t live without. Chewy’s customer service and resulting customer satisfaction score with pet owners are outstanding, providing the company with a competitive advantage that is hard to beat.
Chewy focuses on creating a signature experience at every touchpoint, starting with customer service training that teaches representatives to build connections with customers. Reps learn to go above and beyond, especially when their customers are dealing with the emotional loss of a pet. For American consumers, who tend to think of themselves as pet parents, it is a particularly touching and compelling example of how being human is good business and can lead to an extended customer lifetime.
Chewy’s customer experience action statement is “Exceeding Expectations Through Every Interaction.” Channels for customer service include over the phone and via their website. Contact centers are staffed 24/7 with employees who love pets, all but guaranteeing a warm chat experience in which the customer feels cared for and heard. Chewy built a large internal “wow team” responsible for dreaming up and executing remarkably thoughtful, kind, customizable solutions like the example above. With company policy clearly being to offer the best service ever, it’s not surprising that Chewy has made the list of favorite brands.
Going above and beyond for your customer is about pattern recognition and educating your customer-facing employees on what to look for at each touchpoint. I like to call it the “day-maker dopamine,” which refers to a phenomenon often discussed in psychology and neuroscience. When we engage in acts of kindness or altruism, it can lead to a release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward. And it absolutely has a place in the modern workplace.
This effect has been referred to as a “helper’s high” and has been studied in the context of why people feel good when they help others. The idea is that engaging in altruistic behavior activates the reward centers in the brain, leading to the release of dopamine, which in turn creates a feeling of pleasure or satisfaction. As it turns out, it is a key driver of both employee satisfaction and best-in-class customer experience.
The ability to go above and beyond for customers and co-workers alike allows your employees to put their unique fingerprint on the experience. This fosters creative autonomy, allowing them to come up with their own ideas and exercise their brains in ways that they hadn’t before, giving them a sense of ownership in the experiences they provide. Beyond a basic sense of responsibility, employees are more connected to the experience they are providing when they feel they have a hand in creating it. For strong company cultures and the strongest impact on employee engagement, leaders need to make employees feel safe in always doing the right thing.
Best of all, when your employees perform an act of kindness, they experience an increase in oxytocin, the chemical that makes us feel warm and fuzzy. We even appreciate it when we hear a story of generosity or witness one. This releases oxytocin. It makes us want to be more generous. That is why storytelling and sharing all the great things your team members do for customers and each other is so important.
Organizations achieve greatness when employees are allowed to do unexpected things, showing initiative and creative thinking. They thrive when they are empowered to step outside the norm. That is when delightful, engaging, and amazing results occur.
John DiJulius III, author of The Customer Service Revolution, is president of The DiJulius Group, a customer service consulting firm that works with companies such as Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Ritz-Carlton, Nestle, PwC, Lexus, and many more. Contact him at info@thedijuliusgroup.com or 216-839-1430.