This Company's Customer Service Is So Insanely Good, It Went Viral

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When you’re nice, people smile.

When you’re really nice, people talk.

And when you’re exceptionally and consistently nice, you go viral.

That should be the takeaway from what happened this week on Twitter, when a a happy Chewy customer's tweet racked up nearly 700,000 likes in a day and turned the pet-products company into a trending topic. It also garnered lots of news, like this piece from my Entrepreneur colleague.

There's actually a ton to unpack here — because this tweet did not go viral on its own. It went viral because Chewy has been doing something special for years, and therefore primed its fans to talk about the company at every occasion.

Want to see just how far generosity can take you? Let's dig in.

First, the tweet that started it all:

I mean, let's be clear — that is great customer service. It deserves attention. But why, I wondered, did it get that much attention?

Then I looked at the replies. They are full of people sharing their own amazing Chewy experiences. Stories of getting flowers. Heartfelt cards. And in many cases, even oil paintings of their beloved pet! Like this guy:

That reply alone received more than 20,000 likes and 600 retweets.

The oil paintings thing was big. People were blown away by them, and clearly eager to share. This woman received hand-painted portraits of her cats, after she posted a photo of them inside a Chewy box. "Chewy is the absolute best," she wrote. This woman received a painting of her dog a week after he passed away. "It had us all weeping," she tweeted. "The painting is beautiful and we look at it every single day."

Tweets like these gained a life of their own, drawing more and more people into this viral Chewy love.

How Chewy Did It

This was no accident. Chewy didn't just send out a handful of oil paintings, and then luck out when all the recipients started tweeting at each other. No — the company has absolutely blanketed the pet-loving world with oil paintings.

Chewy sends out 1,000 of these paintings every week.

Every. WEEK.

“Customers were going bananas,” co-founder Ryan Cohen once told the Associated Press, in describing how people first responded to them. He helped come up with the idea back in 2013.

How does a company pull this off, and get its staff to commit so fully to customer service?

First, a clear mission.

“I thought if I could deliver the same kind of personalized experience as the neighborhood pet store, but do it online and deliver a really convenient value proposition, that we could build a really big business,” Cohen told Business Insider.

And how'd he do that? In part, by creating common ground between its staff and its customers: The company's more than 2,500 customer service agents are "passionate pet owners," the AP reports.

When a customer loses a pet, these customer service reps feels their pain. They're also trained to handle a wide range of pet questions, and empowered to make customers feel good with handwritten notes, holiday cards, flowers, and more.

When customers feel that love, they return it in the form of loyalty. Company data shows that active customers “tend to stay with us over long periods of time and increase their spend with us year after year,” Chewy CEO Sumit Singh said in an earnings call earlier this year.

In fact, the company retained 99.7% of its active customers in the first quarter of 2022.

And that's not all!

As I went through the long thread of responses on Twitter, I saw another way in which Chewy's customer service was working: Everyone inside the pet-care ecosystem seemed aware of Chewy's good intentions — including many people who aren't even customers.

For example, here's someone from an animal shelter:

And here's a truck driver:

And here's the most important audience of all — a non-customer with a pet, who just became a customer.

What was Chewy's response to all this on Twitter? Did the company take a victory lap? Offer some discount code? Drop a bit of promotion?

No. Instead, it just quietly replied to the original tweeter:

Now that's just nice.

And it's the whole point.

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Cover credit: Getty Images / Anita Kot