The human element is so key when doing customer service.
I love getting customer emails like this. It gives you a break in your daily routine and lets you interact with your customers on a different level.
I always urge CSR reps to find chances where they can show they are real humans when writing to customers and Chris King from Sainsbury’s definitely accomplished this in his reply to little Lily Robinson. Not only will Lily be excited to go to Sainsbury’s, but now Lily’s parents and everyone who sees this image will interact with their brand on a more human level thanks to Chris.
The human element is so key when doing customer service. Sure people may still have some trouble with Sainsbury’s from time to time, but because of the human connection made, they will be a lot easier to forgive when something does go wrong in the future because lets face it, it’s a lot easier to yell at an Unknown entity at a company than it will be to yell at Chris King who took the time out of his day to respond to and make a 3 and a half year old happy.
When working for SunPoker a few years back, I was given the same opportunity to WOW a customer who emailed and then posted on a forum about us. The title of the Forum post was “Waiting for confirmation that I owned SunPoker“, unfortunately the images are missing but you can see that not only was the original poster happy with the reply to his email that I sent (SunPoker), but it got a ton of support from other forum members and we started to see a big jump in users from this post alone.