Marketing & Growth

The Case for Being Nice

A batch of Steam Controllers shipped to Hungary never arrived. A logistics error by carrier GLS rerouted them to

By Conor Healy

May 29, 2026

A batch of Steam Controllers shipped to Hungary never arrived. A logistics error by carrier GLS rerouted them to the United Kingdom instead. Customers contacted Valve’s support team expecting the usual runaround. What they got was an apology and an offer: pick any game on the platform, standard edition, on us.

One customer chose Forza Horizon 6, a €70 title that had not even released yet. For a two-week shipping delay caused by a third party, Valve handed over a AAA game at no charge.

The best customer service examples look irrational when you only count the immediate cost. A €70 game for a logistics error that was not even Valve’s fault. But the calculation changes when you factor in what happens next: the Reddit post, the screenshots, the loyalty that outlasts any single transaction.

Valve’s Turnaround

Valve had notoriously bad customer service for years. In 2015, reaching an actual human at Steam Support felt nearly impossible. Kotaku called it “Peak Badness Year.” Tickets sat unanswered. Refunds were denied by default. The complaints were constant.

Then something shifted. Valve overhauled the system, reduced response times, and started giving support agents real discretion. The results show up in the stories that circulate on Reddit now.

One user requested a refund on a game after playing for six hours, well past Steam’s official two-hour policy. The request was denied. He replied with another message, adding “pretty please?” The refund was approved.

There is no published policy that says “pretty please equals refund.” There is no flowchart for shipping a free game when a controller goes missing. The pattern is simpler: Valve gives its support team permission to be human, and humans tend to do reasonable things when given the chance.

A commenter on Reddit summarised the Steam Controller incident: “Valve seems to be one of the only companies that understands that if you treat your customers with the most basic level of human decency, losing money on the game builds such loyalty that you’ll end up spending more money with them in the future.”

A free Steam game costs Valve almost nothing. The goodwill it buys is worth considerably more.

Chick-fil-A’s Tyre Change

Chick-fil-A has ranked first on the American Customer Satisfaction Index for restaurants ten years running. In the 2020 Newsweek survey of 20,000 customers across 160 categories, the chicken chain scored 9.08 out of 10, placing fifth overall. The only companies above it were Disney Cruise Line, Neiman Marcus, The Ritz-Carlton, and Edward Jones.

Those rankings do not come from training videos. They come from accumulation: thousands of small decisions made by employees who were trusted to do the right thing.

In 2019, a 96-year-old World War II veteran arrived at a Chick-fil-A in Maryland visibly shaken. He had driven there on a flat tyre and barely made it. After hearing what happened, manager Daryl Howard walked outside and changed the tyre himself. Fifteen minutes later, the customer was back on the road.

At another location, an employee named Marcus Henderson noticed a customer had driven away without his change. It was not a large amount, but Henderson brought the money to every shift for a month until the customer returned. “There wasn’t any peace in keeping it,” he said. “This was the right decision.”

Chick-fil-A trains employees to say “my pleasure” instead of “you’re welcome.” It sounds small, almost performative. But small rituals shape culture, and culture shapes behaviour. When a manager changes a tyre because it seems like the right thing to do, that is culture working.

Zappos and the 10-Hour Call

Zappos built its entire brand on customer service. The company offered free shipping on all returns, no matter how many transactions it took, and a 365-day return policy. Founder Tony Hsieh believed that investing in service rather than advertising would pay off through loyalty and word of mouth. Before Amazon acquired Zappos, 75% of its sales came from returning customers.

The stories are extreme by design. One customer service call lasted 10 hours and 43 minutes. The agent had already solved the customer’s problem. They stayed on the line because the customer wanted to chat.

In another case, a customer realised she had forgotten her favourite shoes on a trip to Las Vegas. She called Zappos to reorder them, but the style had been discontinued. A customer service representative found the shoes at a local mall, bought them, and hand-delivered them to the customer’s hotel at no charge.

Zappos does not measure support agents primarily by call time or ticket volume. The assumption is that the customer will come back, and the maths works differently when retention is the metric.

Trader Joe’s in the Snow

Trader Joe’s does not deliver groceries. That is company policy, full stop. But during a heavy snowstorm in Pennsylvania, an 89-year-old man called his local store. His daughter had been trying to arrange food delivery for him, worried he would be snowed in for days. The store manager took the order over the phone, packed the bags, and drove them to his house. No charge for the groceries. No charge for delivery. When the daughter tried to pay, the store refused.

The story circulated online for years. It is not an isolated incident. Trader Joe’s employees have walked elderly customers to their cars, helped carry bags into homes, and called regular customers when a favourite product returned to shelves.

The company does not track these interactions in a CRM. There is no program called “surprise and delight” with a budget line. Staff are simply given permission to be helpful, and helpful things happen.

The pattern across these companies is permission. Employees are allowed to make judgment calls. They are trusted to solve problems in ways that make sense in the moment, even when those solutions are not written down anywhere.

88% Come Back

There is a version of business advice that treats every human interaction as a transaction to be optimised. Minimise costs. Maximise extraction. Assume the customer is a problem to be managed.

The companies in these examples operate differently. They treat customers like people, give employees permission to help, and absorb small costs without fighting over them. The question is whether that approach survives contact with a spreadsheet.

It does. According to Salesforce, 88% of customers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive service experience. Businesses that prioritise customer experience grow revenue 1.7 times faster than those that do not. Customer experience leaders outperform the S&P 500 by 307% on stock returns, according to Watermark Consulting.

A €70 game costs Valve almost nothing to give away. The tyre change took Daryl Howard fifteen minutes. The snowstorm delivery was one employee’s afternoon. These gestures are not charity. But they are also not calculated investments with projected ROI. They are what happens when companies decide that being decent is not incompatible with being profitable.

The business case does not make the behaviour worthwhile. It just removes the excuse for not doing it. You do not have to choose between penny-pinching and survival. The spreadsheet will catch up. In the meantime, you get to be the kind of company that changes a veteran’s tyre.