Customer Engagement – Wegmans Style

October 18, 2011

Some of you might know Gretchen, my better, smarter and seemingly more socially influential half. Recently, she was spurred by her love of the Wegmans grocery store chain to organize the #wegupma event – essentially a rented van full of friends and family that arrived and reveled in the grand opening of the Northborough, MA Wegmans store.

She wrote a blog post about her experience at the grand opening and also included in that post a little sadness. During our trip to Wegmans (the grand opening was also attended by 24,994 other rabid fans), she forgot to purchase plastic wrap and paper towels.

Well, Wegmans is on the social media ball. They tweeted at us all day, followed and retweeted our photos of the grand opening. Engaged with us about our experiences. And when they saw that Gretchen forgot her paper towels and plastic wrap, they called her.

Actually, Kevin Russell, store manager at the new Wegmans called her. He left a message saying that he felt sorry that our Wegmans experience was incomplete and was sending a delivery to our house in Hingham. Seriously. TO OUR HOUSE, 47 miles away. Here’s the video of what we found on the porch when we got home today…

So, if you run a company that might be having some trouble understanding the right and wrong ways to engage using social media, I urge you to take a lesson from the Wegmans team. They spend time paying attention to what people are sharing about them on the Web (active listening), and they actually think about what matters to people – being heard and being valued.

If you don’t think this type of activity pays off, ask yourself if your business could benefit from 25,000 people coming to your next grand opening.