Concerned Patriot

Digital stress relief is real deal.

Lyle Yarbourgh quite literally cares about your survival. Starting out in 2010, offering green energy that promoted independence from big utilities, Concerned Patriot pivoted a couple years ago.

The company has become a hybrid of a survival blog and an affiliate marketing machine. With 204,000 Facebook followers, Lyle’s outfit found a lasting niche by providing a voice and advice on everything from making emergency rations to “best of” round-ups on DIY home defense.

The business model is audience-intensive — and that includes its customer base.

“We’re not here to make a buck and move onto the next person,” says Lyle of his bottom-line philosophy. “That belief has to be at the top of your list if you want to stick around. The more customers you can keep versus acquire, the better you are.”

Taming the call of the wild.

In addition to its website’s mammoth curation of survivalist content, Concerned Patriot uses a fulfillment company, buying the products while its fulfillment house packs and ships. But customer service remains staunchly in-house.

Debbie, a fixture inside Concern Patriot’s customer service group, has built-in radar when it comes to customer satisfaction.

“Part of it is that we offer great products,” she says, “and that our customers are very happy with the products. They know if they receive something and there’s a problem, it’ll be fixed quickly and efficiently. I like to think of it more as customer relations than support.”

Indeed, Lyle characterizes Debbie as the voice of the customer inside Concerned Patriot.

Service of the fittest.

Survivalists tend to be on the conservative end of the spectrum. Catering to this consumer segment calls for being on top of your game, day in and day out.

Concerned Patriot logged into FuseDesk seven years ago, enabling the small startup to work on equal footing in the rapidly sophisticated world of e-commerce.

“On the customer service side,” Debbie shares, “the fact that customers can email us, and we respond to them in a timely manner is everything. If I miss a call, it goes into FuseDesk, so I automatically know to call the customer back. It’s very user friendly. It’s not a complicated program which makes my job easier.”

Get that monkey off your backpack.

Lyle and Debbie are diehards when it comes to a “customer first” mentality. Leveraging the integration between Infusionsoft CRM and FuseDesk support system, they can care for their constituency, remain timely and responsive, even as they grow their followers, fans, and buyers.

“One of our customers, Byron, calls about once a month,” says Lyle. “He had received one of our smaller backpacks and was unhappy with the size. We had bigger ones on the way, and I explained, when they come, we’ll send one out to him at no cost.”

The steps and reminders to take care of Bryon are built into FuseDesk and tied into Infusionsoft.

“That’s what we did, we shipped it out to him. He called to thank us.”

And that level of service is what endears Concerned Patriot to its loyal clients — earning this Commitment to Excellence citation.