Chewy’s Next-Level Customer Support

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When Anna’s dog Gus died unexpectedly, she contacted Chewy to see if she could return an unopened bag of his food.

The standard operating procedure at most companies would be to process a refund and move on. Maybe even send an automated "sorry for your loss" email. Call it done.

Chewy is not most companies.

They refunded her immediately and told her to donate the food to an animal shelter. Then, the next day, flowers arrived at her door with a note signed by the customer service representative she'd spoken to.

Turns out this wasn't a one-off gesture or just a particularly empathetic customer support rep. It was completely systematic.

While we marketers often obsess over acquisition channels, optimising funnels and chasing viral campaigns, the highest-leverage brand moment is actually happening right in front of us in support queues. That’s where customers are most vulnerable, most emotional, and most likely to remember exactly how we made them feel.

Here's the problem. Companies treat customer support as operational infrastructure, not a growth opportunity. Don’t get me wrong, that makes sense on paper. Support is an operational cost centre. Marketing is where the growth happens. You hire support people to keep customers from leaving. You hire marketers to bring new customers in.

But that framing misses something pretty important about human psychology.

Support interactions happen when customers are most emotionally engaged. Something has gone wrong. They're frustrated or confused or, in Chewy's case, grieving. They need help.

How you show up in that moment defines your brand more than any campaign you'll ever run.

But most companies still see support as damage control, focused on keeping customers from leaving rather than creating advocates. Solving problems efficiently, not building relationships. Measuring resolution time, not emotional impact.

The missed opportunity is huge. These conversations are already happening at scale. Every support ticket is a customer at a moment of heightened emotion, and most brands waste it by treating the interaction as transactional.

Traditional marketing mostly boils down to interrupting people to tell them you're great. Support interactions are fundamentally different. It’s people coming to you when they actually need you.

That timing matters because of something called the Peak-End Rule.

Researcher (and Nobel prize winner) Daniel Kahneman discovered that people judge experiences based on the most intense moment (the peak) and the final moment (the end).

It’s one of those “once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it” things. Just think about your last holiday. You probably don't remember the average pleasantness of every hour. You remember the spectacular view from that mountain. The meal that blew you away. The flight delay that ruined your last day.

Support calls are often negative peaks. Something went wrong, the customer is upset. But here's where it gets interesting. How you end that interaction disproportionately affects how customers remember not just that support call, but your entire brand.

When Anna's dog died, that was an intensely emotional peak. Grief. Loss. The kind of moment that sticks in memory forever. Chewy could have processed her return with efficiency. "Sorry for your loss. Your refund will arrive in 3-5 business days."

Instead, they sent flowers. Not from "the Chewy team", from the specific person Anna spoke to. Like an actual friend following up after a tough conversation. That ending completely transformed the peak. What could have been a painful reminder of loss became proof that someone genuinely cared. The Peak-End Rule in action.

But there's more happening here than just good timing.

Research on the Service Recovery Paradox has found something pretty counterintuitive. When a service failure is handled exceptionally well, customer satisfaction can actually be higher than if nothing went wrong at all.

Why? Because when something goes wrong, expectations drop. You're just hoping for the issue to be fixed. When a company not only fixes it but exceeds those lowered expectations, satisfaction spikes higher than baseline. It's a positive disconfirmation.

Chewy understand this instinctively. Pet loss isn't a service failure, but it's an emotional crisis for their customers. By responding with genuine empathy, they turned a moment of vulnerability into a moment of connection.

It might sound like this kind of empathetic response is almost obvious, but here's where most brands get it wrong. They think gestures like this are too expensive or too hard to scale.

Chewy started as a bootstrapped startup competing against Amazon and Walmart. They couldn't win on logistics or convenience. They certainly couldn't win on price.

So they focused on what they could win. From day one the mission was clear, replicate the neighbourhood pet store experience online. The place where staff knew your dog's name and asked how they were doing. The place that felt personal.

To do that, they made a conscious and strategic hiring decision. Every single one of their 2,500+ customer service agents is a "passionate pet owner".

Not a “nice-to-have” in the job description. An absolute must.

When a customer calls about their pet dying, the person on the other end doesn't need to fake empathy. They feel it. They've been there. They're not reading from a script about "providing excellent customer service". They're having a genuine human moment with someone who's grieving.

The infrastructure then followed from that foundation.

Agents are actively empowered to send notes, holiday cards, flowers and paintings. Not after getting manager approval. Not after escalating through three levels of bureaucracy. They can just do it.

Chewy's policy from the earliest days was explicit. Create superfans, not just satisfied customers.

That policy required investment, but not the kind most people think. The cost of flowers is around $50. But the value of a customer whose tweet organically goes viral to 700,000 people? Genuinely incalculable.

Chewy competes in one of the most challenging retail categories imaginable. Pet products are largely commoditised. So how do you win when you can't compete on price or convenience?

You compete on something much harder to replicate. You make people feel cared for.

A Harvard Business Review study found that emotionally connected customers are 52% more valuable than satisfied customers.

Read that again. Not slightly more valuable. 52% more.

A separate study looked at retail specifically. Emotionally connected customers had 306% higher lifetime value. They stayed loyal for an average of 5.1 years compared to 3.4 years. They spent up to 2x as much on brands they were loyal to.

These aren’t marginal gains. This is the difference between a commodity business and a defensible one.

Chewy's numbers prove the theory. They retained 99.7% of their active customers in Q1 2022.

Think about that for a second. In a category where customers can comparison shop instantly, where Amazon is one click away, they kept basically every single customer.

When your dog dies and Chewy sends flowers, where are you buying your next pet's food?

This emotional connection compounds over time. Each genuine interaction reinforces the relationship. Each story shared creates more awareness. Each customer who becomes an advocate does your marketing for you.

Competitors can copy Chewy's product overnight. They can match, and even beat, their prices or delivery speed.

But they can't replicate years of cultural infrastructure that makes empathy systematic. They can't copy the trust that comes from consistently showing up for customers in vulnerable moments.

That's why they’re worth $2.1 billion, the amount PetSmart paid to acquire them in 2017.

Not because Chewy had better logistics than Amazon. Because they had brand equity even Amazon couldn't copy.

In a truly class act that I think perfectly captures why Chewy have succeeded so much with this strategy, when Anna's tweet went viral, Chewy had a choice. They could have easily taken a victory lap. Shared her story on their social channels. Offered a discount code “ANNA10” to capitalise on the moment. Tried to convert viral attention into immediate sales.

The strongest competitive advantage isn't what you say about your own brand. It's how you make people feel when they need you most.

Every support interaction is an opportunity to prove who you are. Most brands waste it by treating those moments as operational tasks to complete efficiently.

The ones that treat them as points of human connection can build brand moats competitors can't ever hope to cross.

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