I called L.L. Bean last night to see about exchanging the belt I ordered from them (too big, fancy that).
[ol]
[li]The number was plainly visible on the invoice. There was no sleazy attempt to hide it.[/li][li]The call was answered after two rings.[/li][li]The call was answered by a human being.[/li][li]The person who answered my call was also the person who handled the exchange. There was no passing me to other departments.[/li][li]She was friendly and helpful.[/li][/ol]
I love doing business with L.L. Bean. Their stuff is pretty good, too.
You should send them a letter and let them know. That stuff can really make a difference to some people and companies would be better off knowing that.
Yeah, L.L. Bean is great for that sort of thing. Last time I ordered something from them (a backpack), I was wondering why it took so long to show up, so I checked the tracking info. Surprise! It was listed as delivered, but I had no backpack. I called them up, assured them there was nowhere the package could be that I didn’t see it, and she said they’d send a new one out right away, which they did – 2-day delivery.
My only problem with them is with sizing–or should I say my particular body size. The last couple of things I ordered, the medium was a little too small and the large was a little too big. Not their fault of course, but I had for pay for return shipping, and and I ended up with no shirt and no windbreaker.
Their “Explorer Pants” from back in the 80s were the absolute best pair of outdoor/camping pants I’ve ever owned.
I was wearing a hudson bay blanket coat previously belonging to my grandmother and purchased sometime back in the 1930s, the person spotted the damaged zipper, and took it off to be repaired, they also fixed the pocket lining which had a hole in it by replacing the entire lining. Free. 50 years or so after the original purchase.
I am a big llbean fan. I bought a lot of collared tees back in the day. It annoyed me that they all shrunk in different weird ways. Some got short, some got skinny, I lined them all up in a row, took a picture of them and llbean replaced them all.
LL Bean used to offer a lightweight pullover sweater they called the “Bluejeans Sweater.” I loved that sweater. I wore the ones I owned to shreds. Then they discontinued it. I wrote in and bitched. No joy.
Fast-forward to 4 years ago.
I get an e-mail from Bean advising me that they have reintroduced the sweater under a different name, and that I should try one.
Joy!
What kind of company keeps that kind of track of their customers? LL Bean, that’s who.
They still call it a Blue Jean Sweater, but you can’t order it on-line. You have to call the operator. Which isn’t a bad deal, cuz they’re really friendly, even on New Year’s Eve and you are drunk.
There was a mall in St. Paul that had the parking lots named after animals. I was there once, probably 22 years ago, and to this day I remember where I parked.
A law was made a distant moon ago here
July and August cannot be too hot
And there’s a legal limit to the snow here
In camel lot
My dad buys a certain kind of slippers they sell. They wore out as they tend to do, and on one of my parents’ trips up to Northern Maine, they stopped at LL Bean to see if they could get a new pair. They not only replaced the slippers, but refunded him about $.50 because the old slippers were more expensive than the new ones, even though they were the same kind. Talk about customer service!
Marketing consultants uses the phrase “moment of truth” to define instances when a company can define itself to a customer. For instance, when a Southwest ticket agent momentarily leaves her desk at a busy terminal to console an obviously distraught and confused teenager who missed her connecting flight, and directs a skycap to walk her through the process of getting a meal voucher and hotel room. The teenager and her parents are now probably loyal Southwest customers.
L.L. Bean seems to go out of their way to look for these moments of truth, and it seems to be paying off. Readers here who never considered buying from L.L. Bean might reconsider based on what we’ve been saying.
Very good description of the parking lot scene.