Green Mountain Coffee: A Customer Service Gem

COMPANY:  Green Mountain Coffee

LOCATION:  Waterbury, VT

DATE OF SERVICE:  March 26, 2010

In a world where tip-top Customer Service all too often seems gone for good, sometimes I find a diamond in the rough.  Once in a blue moon, I have an interaction with a company or place that makes me think that there are actually a few people left on this Earth who actually care about others.  And one of my main goals for The Spy Mom is to give credit where it is due in these instances when I encounter someone who goes above and beyond.

You will notice that I have a new feature on my sidebar labeled “100% Spy Mom Approved.” This area of my blog is reserved for those companies who have exceeded my expectations with the caliber of service they have provided me with.

I’m pleased to announce that Green Mountain Coffee Roasters has secured the first spot!

I have had a Keurig coffee maker for years now, and ever since I’ve owned it, I’ve been using the online Cafe Express ordering system from Green Mountain Coffee to purchase my K-cups.  Cafe Express is great, because it allows you to set up recurring delivery of your coffee so that you don’t have to worry about making your way downstairs one morning only to realize you have one K-cup left!  There are many wonderful different coffee selections to choose from, and you are able to customize your order with the number of boxes you’d like to receive, and also how many weeks apart you’d like them to be delivered.

For quite some time now, I’ve been getting 2 boxes of Lake and Lodge K-cups every 3 weeks.  Last Friday, March 26th, I went to retrieve my shipment from my doorstep, and I was pretty shocked to find that the box had been damaged.  It actually looked like it had been opened and that someone had re-taped it shut.  I opened the shipping box and took out the 2 boxes of K-cups, both of which were kind of smashed up.  I wasn’t sure what kind of condition the actual cups would be in, and when I opened each individual box, I found about 4 or 5 smushed K-cups in each.

I took out the packing slip and decided to call the 1-800 number for Green Mountain Coffee just to make them aware of the fact that my order had arrived damaged and to see if there was anything that they could do about the unusable K-cups.  Honestly, I fully expected them to tell me to pack the box back up and ship it back to them in order to prove that it had actually been damaged.  I figured that it would probably cost me more to get them replaced than to just suck it up and head to the local grocery store to purchase a couple of boxes of K-cups until my next shipment came.

I dialed the number and my call was answered (by a human being)! within 30 seconds or less.  The woman who I was connected with was absolutely wonderful.  I am 99% sure that her name was Lisa.  I actually wrote her name down on the packing slip, which accidentally got thrown out this past weekend when my husband and I were frantically trying to de-clutter the house to get ready for a little dinner party we were having.  If her name wasn’t Lisa, then it was Linda, or something very similar to that.

I explained the condition of the boxes and K-cups to her, and she immediately apologized for the problem, logged into my Cafe Express account, and told me that she would re-ship two new boxes of Lake and Lodge cups to me right away, no questions asked!  Now THAT is what I call A+ Customer Service!  And her elite quality of service didn’t end there.  Lisa (??) took a better look at my account and realized that I was ordering 2 boxes of coffee every 3 weeks and paying shipping on my order.  She pointed out that if I ordered 4 boxes at a time, I would get free shipping, so she changed my order to receive 2 boxes of Lake and Lodge and added 2 boxes of Nantucket K-cups to be delivered every 6 weeks.  Now I am getting the same amount of coffee, but I am getting it in one bulk order instead and it costs me less.  She actually SAVED me money!  There aren’t very many companies left out there who actually care about their customers enough to do that!

**FINAL VERDICT:  Green Mountain Coffee values their customers and take prides in the quality of their products.**

I will be a life-long purchaser of Green Mountain Coffee, and will continue to promote their products to others for these reasons:

Disclosure:  All of the opinions expressed in this review are strictly derived from my own, personal experience that I had with Green Mountain Coffee.  I was not compensated for this review in any way by Green Mountain Coffee.  I wrote this review to highlight the high level of customer service I received.  If you have any questions or concerns about Green Mountain or their products, please contact them directly.  If you have any questions about this review, you can contact me via email at thespymom(at)gmail(dot)com.