How Exceptional Customer Service Powers Farmgirl Flowers

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Farmgirl Flowers, the company known for delivering beautiful blooms wrapped in burlap packaging, is loved for much more than that—they are known for providing exceptional customer service.

In this episode of Radically Personal, I chat with Founder & CEO, Christina Stembel about how she started a floral business from her San Francisco-based apartment, her approach to customer service and how the importance of prioritizing loyalty is the future of commerce.

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Founded in 2010, Christina knew she wanted to start a business early on. Her disruptive model for Farmgirl solved for the lack of quality of flowers and arrangements that would, in her experience, never arrive looking as they had online from existing e-commerce companies. With just her personal savings and a dining room table in her apartment, Farmgirl Flowers was created.

For the multi-million-dollar company, customer service is at the pinnacle of Farmgirl Flowers. In fact, Christina’s father spent 41 years as a customer service frontline worker, so she is dogmatic about not outsourcing her CX team—even when a lot of companies consider it to reduce costs. She has created an organization that prizes its compassionate, high-performing CX team and empowers her service heroes to build meaningful relationships with their customers, something that is less possible when you outsource your team or are structured around legacy tickets and cases.

“You can’t have that [great] experience when you’re outsourcing to a company that’s charging you by ticket or by case as we talked about too, every time they say, “Thank you.” That’s another ticket and stuff like that in case you just can have that experience.”

Christina Stembel

Founder & CEO, Farmgirl Flowers

When you look at the company’s reviews online (they pride themselves in landing top charts for reviews in the United States), the reviews aren’t just around how great their product is, but rather how great their service is. Building loyalty is key to Farmgirl Flowers success and in fact, Christina acknowledges that her CX team has the hardest job in the company, but even through dealing with complicated customer issues her team can build long-lasting relationships that create customers for life. She acknowledges that her customers buy from them because they not only like their product, but because they like their company and that’s because the service they provide.

“Especially a small business like us, we really rely on word of mouth and people do not take the time out to their busy schedules to go write glowing reviews about the product but they do about service. It’s almost 100% service-related… yes we’re a product company 50% of what we do is product and 50% is service? We’re a service company. We’re providing a great service to our customers which is why I think we have really devout fans.”

Christina Stembel

Founder & CEO, Farmgirl Flowers

Listen to the rest of Christina’s episode and more on Gladly’s Radically Personal Podcast page, Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, or Spotify.