Name: Why Chewy’s CEO leads with a Disney mindset: “You just feel like you're part of a dream world”
Uploaded: 2024-04-17
Duration: 6 min 42 s
Description: Sumit Singh compares Chewy’s customer service to “the best hospitality resorts.”

Sumit Singh compares Chewy’s customer service to “the best hospitality resorts.”

Why Chewy’s CEO leads with a Disney mindset: “You just feel like you're part of a dream world”

Photo illustration by Fortune. Photograph courtesy of Chewy.

Leadership

We get to see our pets every day at work. It's pretty awesome. Everyone brings when it comes to the office. I mean, the amount of we, we were, you know, we were thinking, how are we going to get any work done? And, and how do you kind of keep all these pets in check? But believe it or not, it's, it's everybody behaves and it just works like sheer chaos. We've had, we've had, you know, besides dogs and cats, we've had potbellied pigs and we've had hamsters and welcome to leadership next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Alan Murray and I'm Mia, the Chewy was founded as a food and supplies company. We would serve you your food, we would, you know, ship you your dog collars and beds and all that stuff. But there's much more to a pet's journey than that pet's life cycle than that. There's an entire health vertical, there are non healthcare services. And then what, why just pet parents think about the community that services, pet, right? You're, you're the veterinarian, the groomer, the trainer, the dog park friend, right. Looking for content servicing pet, et cetera, et cetera. And we said, well, why should we only be stand for customers? Let's stand for partners. And what that tells you is from a business mindset. What it was saying was we should be a B to cab to B company, et cetera. So if you put that together, Alan, you not only get a mission and purpose that people can get behind, you get the strategy of the organization and at any point, you can look at that and say, well, where are you trending in fulfilling that, that, that this, this journey? And it's meant to be enduring. So, over the last six years, we've really built out our health vertical and so we're very proud of that. So we've connected food supplies and health. We've built out B to C services, B two B services for veterinarians. And so we're super proud and so we, and we've just entered Canada as our first International Forest. We all know Ecommerce is a tough business. Um Just tell us a little bit more about your philosophy, the underlying philosophy for customer service and customer loyalty. You know, I'm a product of consumer tech experience forward companies, Dell being one, you know, Amazon being the other. And so when I got to Chewy, right, I was like, well, great. It's just a customer service or customer care team. And this is the journey. Sometimes you as a leader need to observe and evolve to be able to truly assimilate through what is a gold nugget in the foundation or the growth of a company stage? And I looked at our customer care and I experienced it and as I experienced our customer care, you know, I did not think about any customer care organization. I thought about Disney, my experience when I walked through a Disney Park and how we feel in the way that, you know, you, you just feel like you're a part of a dream world, like being welcomed. I compared Chuy to the best hospitality resorts in the way that you are served in the way that you are treated in the way that you received and in the way that you're you're respected when you walk through the best hospitality resorts. So that's the mindset in the way that we approach customer service, right? So if I were to summarize this from a business point of view, I would say Chewy is uh you know, we are delivering the scale and convenience of e-commerce, but at the best personalized service or a high touch, personalized service, you should expect that the best local neighborhood pet store. Can you share the story real quick of um this incident? That kind of went viral where somebody is a customer's pet died and you send a message and tell the story. We have what we call surprise and delight uh moments uh where we want to be with the customer's life cycle or journey through the highs and lows of pet parenting. And this moment that you're referring is a low of pet parenting when somebody's pet passed away and when that happens, right. I we, we get to know we send flowers, right. We send, because at that moment, we are sympathetic, empathetic, we send flowers, we send greetings, handwrit cards. And you know, that moment is a very special moment because most companies will not invest, you know, X number of dollars to be able to pick up flowers to send to customers and be there right in that moment for them and posts like these. That's not the only thing we do. We send you handwrit birthday cards, we send you welcome cards. We will send you surprise and delight. We work with over 1000 local artists where we will send you hand drawn pet portraits which you cannot buy from us. They will show up to your doorstep, surprise and delight. And let me tell you this when you get a hand drawn pet portrait of your beloved pet. I have you for life on the customer service side for a company. That's so, you know, so much of your DNA and and your culture is around customer loyalty and it's really like high touch customer service. You're talking about handwrit notes, like not a lot of e-commerce companies do that. How do you look at the opportunities with some of these A I powered chat bots A I agents um help with customer service without diluting everything that you guys stand for. It is natural to assume that technology and personalization or technology and creativity are are conflicting with each other. And I think what we have to realize is that human beings are great at creativity, they always will be and technology is great, is great at delivering scale. And so you have to marry these up smartly, right? Our our local artists or our handwrit notes in a way that we assimilate through the language, right? Is, is a very personalized mechanism that we are seeking to keep. At the same time, I can automate all of the segmentation of customers, the targeting of customers, the identification of those cohorts. I can also automate how I pick up the right portrait when a customer uploads a pet profile and pass it on to my artist pretty digitally and pretty seamlessly. So I've essentially eliminated process waste without really taking out creativity from the system. I want to, we're, we're developing something called uh a tool like uh which is called CS R buddy. It is meant to be a friend to the customer service uh or the customer care team and what it's essentially AAA Prompter tool, it downloads, it has all information about the customer. It has a knowledge base which will marry content to, to let them have more intelligent conversations. We try not to hire from deeply ingrained CS contact centers because because we we, we, because we have to untrain them to get them to unlearn the bad habits of getting the customer off the phone. We want to pick up your phone in two rings or less. Right. And so we, we, we tell our agents just have a conversation.