Vincent Tricarico of NutraScience Labs: “5 Ways To Create a Wow! Customer Experience”

Be Thankful and kind- very simple, but at the end of the day being pleasant, being grateful for a customer’s business, showing them you have an interest in their success and want to be an integral part of that is how great business relationships are started and maintained. If you show you are a kind, respectful and caring partner, customers will appreciate the extra efforts you go to show this is the case. A simple “thank you” always goes a very long way. Especially in today’s rushed world of what’s next.

As part of my series about the five things a business should do to create a Wow! customer experience, I had the pleasure of interviewing Vincent Tricarico.

Vincent Tricarico currently serves as Executive Vice President for NurtraScience Labs. With nearly 20 years of direct-to-consumer and business-to-business experience, Mr. Tricarico is a respected executive in the dietary supplement industry and is well-known for his ability to consistently build and grow successful teams that produce results. Over the years, his work has been published in many industry trade publications, such as Natural Products Insider, Nutritional Outlook, and WholeFoods Magazine.

Thank you so much for joining us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

My career in the dietary supplement industry started from modest, innocent beginnings. Growing up on Long Island, I was always interested in sports, fitness and, as time went on, I took an interest in wellness and nutrition. Specifically, as a hockey player, I was always looking for ways to get faster and stronger so the industry intrigued me. When an opportunity to work part time during college as a sales representative for a nutraceutical company came my way, I jumped at it. 7 years later I was the COO of the company which had grown to 300 people and was selling products all over the world. At my current business, we focus on where the white space is in the industry and became the first truly one-stop-shop for manufacturing, packaging design, and fulfillment in the dietary supplement business. The proof that the model works is 12 years later, we have many more competitors than we did when we started.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

As I was making my way through the ranks of management, more responsibility would come my way. One of the first times I was responsible for locking up the building, I thought I had locked myself in the facility shared restroom! My cellphone was at my desk in our office and everyone had gone home for the weekend. I checked both front pockets and there was no key and the door was locked! For 15 minutes, I contemplated how I was going to be fired for being stuck in the bathroom. The lesson learned was to always check my back pocket, which is where I thankfully had the key to get back into our part of the office. The lesson there was my inexperience caused panic where if I was a bit more composed I would have realized to check all my pockets immediately but in that frantic 15 minutes, calm and poise was no where to be found.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

I am grateful for the first COO I worked for early on in my career. He saw a raw ability in me that was just looking to be pulled out. He also trusted me and my instincts to take on responsibilities that were usually reserved for much more experienced managers. I learned so much from him and the trust he had in me allowed me to grow into the senior leader that I am today. The first true show of faith was when he sent me to New Hampshire to train a secondary call center on our product line. He gave me just enough guidance but also allowed me to design the training from the ground up. When the secondary call center’s performance greatly improved, this opened up the eyes of our CEO and I was able to start to gain his trust as well. From there, opportunities continued to find me, but it all started with the faith and trust he had in me.

Thank you for that. Let’s now pivot to the main focus of our interview. This might be intuitive, but I think it’s helpful to specifically articulate it. In your words, can you share a few reasons why great customer service and a great customer experience is essential for success in business?

Customer service is a value its not just a part of a business. In order to have great customer service, this has to be something that is naturally emitted from your business and that means your team has to be passionate about delivering world class customer service. You accomplish this through your hiring decisions and how you reward and recognize outstanding performance. It’s important that your team feel both an urgency and a sense of satisfaction when they overdeliver for a customer and essentially live and breathe customer experience. When customers feel that emission of a personal responsibility of delivering outstanding care, they begin to trust, and when you have trust, you are given the opportunity to sustain and earn more of a customer’s business. One of the most rewarding comments we receive from our customers is when they tell us “we know your team will do whatever it takes to get it done beyond our expectations”. Providing a great customer experience could be something as simple as always making sure the phone is answered or speaking to a live person who can immediately address a customer’s concern. This is something that’s been lost a bit in the quest to become ever leaner while continuing to grow. The little things certainly matter when you are trying to build a WOW customer experience.

We have all had times either in a store, or online, when we’ve had a very poor experience as a customer or user. If the importance of a good customer experience is so intuitive, and apparent, where is the disconnect? How is it that so many companies do not make this a priority?

I truly believe companies strive to create good customer service, but sometimes sacrifice this in the name of growth and profitability. This has a lot to do with the organizational structure and how much a leadership team is able to connect with those on the front lines. In my experience, management should always be just close enough to get a sense of how customers are interacting with a company, we should know the good as well as the bad. By having clear communication around customer experience, you should never feel like you have employees who think leadership “doesn’t get it or doesn’t care”. Everyone should feel they have an open door and a clear path to work a solution for a customer.

Do you think that more competition helps force companies to improve the customer experience they offer? Are there other external pressures that can force a company to improve the customer experience?

In any industry, there is going to be outside forces that drive companies to adapt. One way

a company can separate itself from its competition is through its customer experience. I think the changing landscape of the marketplace especially today forces companies to think differently about customer experience. For example, if you go back 20 years when the retail marketplace was king, you took care of your retail partners in the industry and they in turn took care of your end user. Fast forward to today, most shopping is done digitally and the companies that have been able to create an online community where customers can find the product or service they are looking for are now presented in an easily digestible format. By being an active part of this community through channels like blog posts and videos, companies can truly separate themselves in our industry.

Can you share with us a story from your experience about a customer who was “Wowed” by the experience you provided?

When our business was starting out 12 years ago, we were a new player in an industry dominated by big players; however, the big players did not focus on customer service, no one answered the phone, you couldn’t get updates on when products would be finished or why products were delayed. There was an empty hole for existing brands to try to enter the marketplace. This is where our business model, which focused on all the little things that the big players were too busy to pay attention to, allowed us to grow. We offered solutions no one else could. For example, a major retailer was trying to enter the organic space utilizing an organic powder that came packed in packets of 30 on a retail store display. When they reached out to the known commodities in the industry, no one wanted to take on a project so complex. When they reached out to us, we were more than happy to work with them on all the moving pieces and were able to deliver the project to their satisfaction.

Did that Wow! experience have any long term ripple effects? Can you share the story?

I think it really affirmed for us that going the extra mile and working with customers as operational partners to their business and making their ideas not only a reality, but a success was a business model that had many layers of growth potential. To this day, we continue looking for the projects that play to our strongest ability — be able to handle the ultra-complex while communicating effectively through the entire project.

Ok, here is the main question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things a founder or CEO should know in order to create a Wow! Customer Experience. Please share a story or an example for each.

We relate back to how we create our excellent customer experience through our core values as a business. The little things matter and through that we are trying to build relationships that are long-term and built on trust. Additionally, it’s the expectation that we have for our team. We expect the needs of our customers to come before all others and we are to treat customers as we expect to be treated. If the situation presents itself to go above and beyond, don’t ask, just do it. When a management team is passionate about customer service, they will hire and cultivate a team that feels the same way. We believe that every member of our team needs to be passionate about the experience they are providing to our customers.

Five ways to create this wow customer experience include:

1. Do what you say you are going to do. A customer needs to be able to count on our word. We need to be sure that our team is equipped with the right resources and support to ensure that if they make a commitment to a customer, that the operation is ready to support that commitment. In our business, we are constantly pushed for aggressive completion dates so it’s essential that our operations team is constant contact with our customer service team to ensure the right updates are being delivered at all times. Another element of this is that sometimes you have to be ok with delivering less than good news. Being honest with customers and working with them to find solutions when they come up is another part of this first way a business can create a wow customer experience.
2. The old adage of under promising and over delivering still resonates today as it did in the past. If you can promise a solution but then go the extra mile to satisfy a customer, you will gain their appreciation and not only gain their trust but the positive word of mouth about your business. We stress in our business that we are going to be honest with you about your project from the minute you start working with us, but we will look for opportunities to add value along the way. One of the things our business does for customers is we utilize our years of experience to stop a customer from making a bad decision because we saw it once or twice before. That experience in itself can wow a customer.
3. Resourceful problem solving. This again goes back to empowering employees to go above and beyond and find a solution that may not be apparent or according to the “standard operating procedure”. Employees should feel that they can utilize whatever means are necessary to solve a customer’s problem. By proactively solving a customer’s problem, you gain their trust and you become an added resource that they can count on. Our business is always creating custom storage agreements for customers that utilize our facilities whenever a customer finds themselves in a situation they weren’t expecting.
4. Offer rapid response times and even beat the request with the information. We like to be proactive in offering updates on the status of a project and love it even more when a customer doesn’t even have to reach out to us to know their order is shipping. At the same time, when a response does come in, it has to be treated as a top priority and every piece of the organization has to feel that urgency to try to deliver a rapid proper answer to whatever the customer might be asking at that moment. It’s not just good enough to answer the question in the expected time frame, in order to wow a customer, you have to do better than that.
5. Be Thankful and kind- very simple, but at the end of the day being pleasant, being grateful for a customer’s business, showing them you have an interest in their success and want to be an integral part of that is how great business relationships are started and maintained. If you show you are a kind, respectful and caring partner, customers will appreciate the extra efforts you go to show this is the case. A simple “thank you” always goes a very long way. Especially in today’s rushed world of what’s next.

Are there a few things that can be done so that when a customer or client has a Wow! experience, they inspire others to reach out to you as well?

In our business, we utilize surveys and all of the senior management team is on those surveys, we want to hear directly from our customers in what way are we meeting or exceeding their expectations, because this has been such a focus of ours, we are happy to see so many reviews where we are exceeding expectations but in those instances where we don’t, we are able to quickly reach out and work together with all involved to see how we can be better. I feel that a customer who is wowed by their experience will tell others without even being asked to do so. The number of referrals we get is something we are very proud of.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

During my 20 years of business, our companies have been very charitable, whether through building homes, donating to various charities for folks stricken with disease etc. The one area that has always been extremely close to my heart is hunger. I am proud to say we have donated tens of thousands of pounds of food to local and national food drives. Even more so, in these uncertain times, if we can continue to provide the basic necessities for those less fortunate than we are, we should and will continue to do so.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

My LinkedIn is the best place to connect with me and follow my articles.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!