Wegmans Scores Customer Service Bull's Eye with Social Media

As companies all over the world struggle to figure out how to use social media, one Rochester retailer gets it right and scores a customer service bull's eye

Saturday's cold weather seemed like a perfect opportunity to make a big pot of chili con carne for the family. My wife Lydia agreed and made a quick run to our local Wegmans to pick up supplies for the meal.

One of my jobs was to brown the ground beef, which Lydia had picked up on the aforementioned shopping run. We had 6.7 pounds of 90% lean ground beef from Wegmans. (We were making two batches and we've got two teen boys if you're wondering about the volume!)

When I was done cooking the meat we both were stunned to see how much liquid had cooked off. We'd never noticed that much before. Honestly, we don't buy much ground beef from Wegmans, so we thought it might be an issue with their quality. I snapped a quick pic with my iPhone and posted it to Twitter with the following comment:

Here's the picture that I attached to my tweet:

Within a few moments I received a response from Wegmans, even though my tweet was not directed to them. I knew from my Twitter use that Wegmans monitors their name in tweets and interacts with people that talk about them. For example, last week someone mentioned that they were going to Wegmans for a quick lunch. Wegmans tweeted after lunch asking them what they had and how they liked it.

Here's the direct message they sent in response:

My wife and I were blown away! An almost immediate response, right in our kitchen, from the retailer. When we first saw the liquid we felt like something was wrong and immediately assumed Wegmans was at fault. Within seconds of posting the pic and comment we got recognition and a promise to get more info. We were impressed and I was able to immediately shift my feelings from mistrust to guarded trust.

Even though the response made us feel better we were still a little skeptical. Maybe it was an automated response. Maybe they're just trying to get us to not publicly complain. Maybe they won't get back to us.

Sunday went by without any info, but I expected that. It was the weekend after all. Monday morning I received the following:

Wegmans had an answer and wanted a better way to contact me. They also started following me so that I could send my email addy via direct message and avoid having to publish it to the whole Twitter community. My direct message response:

Within a few minutes I had a personal email assuring us they did not modify the meat, explaining that our experience with the meat was normal and why and how to best work with ground beef.

You can download a PDF copy of the email response Wegmans sent by clicking here.

I was sold. Not only had Wegmans convinced me that their product was fine, they improved their brand's value in my mind with the amazing way they dealt with this issue.

Kudos to Wegmans for their use of social media—they really get it!

Great job, Wegmans! I've always been a fan, but you really hit the ball out of the park with social media.

By the way, the chili was awesome.