Mark Fitzpatrick

So I promised the real story of a recent, AMAZING customer service experience.

I buy nearly all of my vitamins, supplements, and now raw honey and baby items online. It’s a beautiful thing to click a few buttons, and find diapers, baby wipes, laundry detergent, and vitamins at my door step a few days later.

Well, one day a few months ago, on 95 degree day – I open the front door to leave – and notice five boxes on the porch. We ordered a ton of stuff, from laundry detergent to honey to a green drink, and fabric softener. Only one jug of fabric softener sprung a massive leak, and was puddled on the porch.

I figured, “No worries. I’ll just call up the company – VitaCost, and tell them what happened. I noticed that one of the jars of honey had fabric softener all over it. Not wanting to take a chance, I took a picture of the honey and the porch, fired off an email, and waited for a response.

I got one within an hour I recall, apologizing for the inconvenience, and letting me know they’d send out replacements.

Well, a few days later, my porch has a ton of boxes outside. I drag them in, open them up, and find the same order I had a week ago. I’m talking about the whole daggone order, not just the bottle of fabric softener and the jar of honey.

Of course, I mumbled out loud, “They better not have sent me two of the same order and charged me.”

I look inside one of the boxes and see a piece of paper. It was an invoice, but it had $0.00 next to all the items. They sent me a replacement of everything. So we’re just loaded with Stage 4 diapers for a little son.

The next time I checked email, I saw the email asking me, “If there’s anything else we can do, just let us know.”

So let’s go behind the scenes here a bit.

Do you think VitaCost would just randomly send out a $300 order for free? No way. So why did they? I’m willing to bet they have a process set up that took a look at my order history. When they looked me up, they saw that I spend probably somewhere around $800 a year with them, and have done so for at least three four years now.

So was it worth it for them to “J-Wow” me with $300 of free stuff?

Yep.

It probably cost them $150 to do it. Roughly.

What would have happened had they brushed me off and said, “Too bad. Not our fault.” Real simple. Mark Fitzpatrick (had to throw in a 3rd person once) would have taken his business elsewhere. Plain and simple.

But the BIGGER point is….Did you miss it? They didn’t have to send me a complete replacement order. They could have sent me just the fabric softener and the jar of honey, and I would have been happy and satisfied. I would have stilled kept buying from them.

But they turned a mildly crappy situation into a golden one. And in doing so, they made me feel compelled to keep buying from them – even to think of more things I could buy from them next time that I may have been buying somewhere else. Seriously.

And you know what, I just remembered. They also sent me a massive box of about thirty Atkins product samples. You know the diet stuff. Don’t use it. Wouldn’t use it. Not the point. The gesture of over-the-top customer service to say, “Mark, we do not want you going anywhere,” was more than demonstrated.

I wasn’t expecting them to do all that they did, and that’s probably what made it all the more impressive.