Chewy: Pooching Customer Recovery

Recently, a colleague of mine had an issue with an online pet store – which would be one of those unremarkable “yeah, these things happen” incidents except for how poorly the company handled the attempted service recovery.  

A bit of background: the colleague in question adopted a shelter dog that had a number of serious health issues – it’s an ongoing saga – and she ordered some medications from Chewy, an online pet supply store that has only recently opened its pharmacy business.   And here’s how they attempted to recover after bungling the order:

The lame humor in the message, bad puns that elicit more of a groan than a laugh, might be understandable and perhaps mildly amusing in the course of routine correspondence.    In the wake of a botched order, being cheeky with the customer is probably not a good choice.   And when the botched order prolongs the suffering of someone’s pet because it was a pharmacy order, it’s definitely not a good idea to kid around.

The second problem is that what is being described in the message, an inability to merge orders, has nothing to do with what Chewy had done wrong.   They had mishandled a prescription, initiating a game of phone-tag with themselves and the veterinarian to straighten things out, and causing further confusion as to whether the problem had been addressed.

The third problem is that the offer of a refund, which generally a nice gesture, is not something that helps recover from the problem: it is not that they caused the customer a loss of money, but a loss of time by mishandling the order.   A more appropriate action would be to expedite processing and provide free overnight delivery to help minimize further delay.

And the fourth problem is the missing fourth step of the basic apology model: to provide some reassurance that the problem will not recur in the future, so that the customer won’t be as hesitant to engage with the brand again.   To omit that step seems either arrogant (believing future business can be taken for granted in spite of the problem) or dismissive (not really caring if the customer does business with the brand in future).

In all, none of these things constitutes an egregious error – but it is the combined effect of a lot of small problems that makes this a model for poor customer service in a critical situation.