Worst 10 In Customer Service - L.L.Bean: the benchmark or “boat and tote” of customer service
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In a world of limited lifetime warranties L.L.Bean takes the high road, less travelled, while wearing the latest in Gortex foot technology. They stand by their quality, life time guarantee and most importantly their customer service. Read on…
Everyday we analyze, compare, sort and search, Google, Yahoo, clip ads, flip countless pages and more just to find the right deal. But what happens when the “chosen one”, the best deal or simple transaction goes awry? Who comes to bat for you?
Customer service … or at least that’s the plan
MSN, the de facto home page for more corporate users than Starbucks abusers, reported the “Bottom 10 in Customer Service.” Big names you associate with price and product but not necessarily value show up on this list:
Bottom 10
- Sprint Nextel
- Bank of America
- Comcast
- Time Warner Cable
- AT&T
- Citibank
- Wal-Mart
- Verizon
- Wells Fargo
- DirecTV
Dishonorable Mentions
- Dell
- Circuit City
- Best Buy
- Home Depot
- Sears
- Macy’s
Notice any similarities? These are all household names that are probably responsible for the largest marketing expenditure in their respective industries. But why skimp on the customer service? Is a relationship too costly to manage? Of course it is! <author’s point to be lazy> If you Google (do you capitalize it when used as a verb? I guess so) “cost more to keep a customer” you will find multiple reinforcements to my statement.
The question now is why? Why go against the grain, invest in your customers, seek long term buyer-seller relationships?
I am sure there are countless answers to these questions - profits, image, integrity, ethics … loyalty (notice how I slide morally to the right). Now who is the champion of customer service and comes first to mind as far as customer loyalty is concerned? Well if you read the title of this blog and have been wondering when I was going to get on point now is the time.
Tested and true experience has shown me the pinnacle of customer service is L.L.Bean. When entering college they replaced the 10 year old backpack I had since third grade. L.L.Bean over-nighted a pair of gloves to my grand father on December 23rd because the post office delivered the original order to the wrong address. More recently, my wife and I through our infinite consumer novice ended up with three XL dog beds. At first we were going to replace just one bed. However, we soon found out XL was far bigger than what we imaged from the L.L.Bean website therefore we needed to return two of the beds.
I logged into my UPS account, put together a shipment and received whiplash from the sticker shock that slammed me with $65+ shipping fees!! I frantically voided my order and thought to call L.L.Bean for advice. This was 10:15pm PST. I pulled up their website, easily found their customer service phone number and next to the phone number I found a familiar friendly phrase I have never seen in the corporate world, “anytime.” Where 24/7 rules supreme L.L.Bean walked past the water cooler, beyond the Mantra Machine (the remnants of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse word of the day machine), grabbed a black coffee off the camp fire and replied, “Yea. Call us anytime.”
I dialed.
It rang once.
A woman picked up. It was like calling a friend.
She understood my plight and offered to send me a UPS shipping label for use with my return. I quickly and gratefully accepted the offer.
Total time to resolve my issue: 2 minutes
Total time I will be a L.L.Bean loyal customer: lifetime + word of mouth to family and friends = forever
So while I’ve had my countless run ins from the “Wall of Shame” the few times I have ever needed a success story in customer service, L.L.Bean has not only stepped up to the plate but to string along another baseball metaphor they hit it out of the park!
May 2nd, 2007 at 1:43 am
Very nice…a little too toned down for my “laying off the rock, you’re scaring people” (who by the way can’t spell) writer, but still very good.
I guess I would be scared if I tried to read your stuff and wasn’t able to spell (see two buck chuck comment).
May 3rd, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Like the comment on using GOOGLE or Google in the proper format. Watch out, all the english teachers and writers of the world might attack you with their red pens and curse you with a series of re-writes and Xs. But I digress.
I would like to add another big name company that has poor customer service. Steve Jobs if you are reading this, please don’t shut down my iTunes account. Apple has the worst customer service of all time. Once I called to determine the cause of my iPod crashing. Well my call was sent to India (makes sense considering this is a US company…heaven forbid we make this easy) and the dance of inefficiency and confusion began. The Apple guy said he could not research my problem until I renewed my warranty (insert Apu’s voice from the Simpsons). Much like a tennis match we bantered back and forth, to and fro, and so on and nothing was accomplished. I will conclude this rant by saying that Apple is on my list and much like Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin I will get drunk and rant about this until Steve Jobs comes to me with an apology, a video iPod, and all the songs, videos and tv shows I could want from iTunes for free. So I say, good day sir.
May 31st, 2007 at 3:48 pm
a really nice review. I was preparing for a case study presentation when i came across your blog. its really helpful
… well L L Bean sure does go to great lengths to satisfy customers! I live in Pakistan and our retailers would laugh at our face if we take something back to them 
… you people are blessed to have such caring retailers! thnx and tc 
February 25th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
I think you should add Office Depot - most of the people you talk to are offshore - and don’t understand. A very few seem to be here in the States -