I had a phone number, and there was a prompt for getting to their customer service line. The problem is that prompt took me to a pre-recorded message that told me how to access them through email, their website, and an app. I tried several times to work my way through their phone tree, but I wound up back again at the same recorded message that took me nowhere.

Here’s the thing: I have a support question that a live human (not a bot, thank you) could probably solve in less than 60 seconds. But trying to solve this through an automated mechanism was not only going to take a lot more time, it was unlikely to get me the information I needed—something a human rep would know that their algorithm would not.

More and more, we find ourselves faced with what I’d call customer desertion systems. Once in awhile, you may actually get to a live human in a call center offshore for whom English is obviously not their first language. They can answer the half dozen or so questions covered in their app, and that’s it. Heaven help you if your issues needs escalation.

But then there’s Chewy.com.

We got home last week after having lost our new puppy to find the large bag of dog food we’d ordered from Chewy sitting by the door. Darn. My daughter called Chewy, immediately got a live person, told him what happened, and asked if we could return the unopened box.

He told us how sorry he was that we’d gone through that—it’s never easy to lose a family member. There are no returns on pet food, but they would credit my account for the amount, and we should donate the food to a pet shelter, which we will do.

Wow. How simple was that. He made a potentially difficult conversation easier and reinforced our loyalty to an online website that sells a generic product—pet food. You can bet that when we get the next dog, we’ll be back to Chewy for all of our pet needs.

Not only that, but here I am telling all of you about a great customer service interaction. That’s worth talking about!