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One of the downsides to big business is the inability to treat customers as individuals. People become collectives within demographics, as only scale moves the needle. This has a dark downside, masked as operational efficiency, which ignores the specific interests of any single customer. We’ve all been there.

Some companies have worked hard to prevent this. Starbucks, for example, is said to hire its baristas to preserve that one-to-one feeling and avoid the industrialization of the neighborhood coffee shop.

I recently stumbled across two great examples of big companies acting small. A few weeks ago I was in New York on business and visited the Park Avenue headquarters of JPMorgan Chase. Here’s a massive company that has gotten a lot of negative press recently for regulatory missteps, and I’ve experienced its big bank bureaucracy firsthand. However, as I approached the building on Park Avenue and braced for the sterile-but-necessary security admittance process, I received one of the warmest welcomes I’ve gotten anywhere, at any business. The gentleman monitoring the perimeter gates saw me coming, made eye contact, shook my hand, and proceeded to enthusiastically welcome me like I was their most important visitor of the day. “We are so glad you’re here today!” he told me. And on the way out, he again shook my hand, this time expressing gratitude for my visit, wishing me well and encouraging me to return. I was blown away. Huge company in the heart of Manhattan and one individual made a huge difference in the quality and feeling about my experience there that day.

Sometimes big companies are known for their emphasis on customer service, but they can still impress. Friday was my mother’s birthday, and we had a family dinner in the New York suburbs. My brother had purchased a gift for her online at Nordstrom and arranged for in-store pickup. He planned to take the train out from the city, swing by the store to get the gift, and then scoot over to his son’s soccer game. However, the store didn’t have the gift when he got there. At that point his options were limited, and all were suboptimal. Miss the soccer game? Not give the gift? As one might expect, Nordstrom tried to fix the situation, by calling around and even running over to check a competitor. But it was the next step that blew my brother away. While he went to the soccer game and then on to dinner, the customer service rep drove 30 miles in rush hour traffic to another store, got the gift, and then drove another 35 miles to the restaurant to hand deliver the gift in time for dinner. At dinner, instead of complaining about how Nordstrom’s cross-channel ordering system is screwed up, my brother raved about their service, and he’ll probably do so for the next week.

My wife runs a small online personalized baby gift company, Baby Be Hip. Great customer service is how her business differentiates itself from her big competitors. It’s one of the only ways a small company can out-maneuver a big one. But it’s equally possible for big companies to think small and make a huge impression. I love stories like these, because they put the customer first and illustrate an understanding—at least by the JPMorgan greeter and the Nordstrom customer service rep—that acting small and treating customers as individuals makes a big difference.