Legal Commentary

LL Bean and Trusted Advisors

By Patrick J. Lamb

Charles Green has a wonderful post on his Trusted Advisors blog about LL Bean: Urban Myth Or Rural Superstition.  Pulled from The Consumerist, it tells a story of the Maine Outfitter's legendary customer service.  Guy's wife orders 3 monogrammed shirts for him for Christmas.  Oops.  Wrong size.  She calls to place the order again with the right size and admits her error.  The LL Bean clerk refuses to take the order and insists that she return the shirts so they can replace them with the right sized shirts.  "But their monogramed, so you won't be able to resell them.  And it was my fault," she said.  LL Bean's reply? "I understand that, but we want to make sure are customers are 100% satisfied with their orders."  Wow.

The Trusted Advisors post provides some other examples of exemplary service, including David Maister's promise of 100% satisfaction, promising any unsatisfied customer the option of paying what the customer thought his service was worth.  My friends at Summit Law Group include a similar promise on their invoices.  With Summit's blessing, we at Valorem Law Group have included "Value Adjustment Line" on every invoice.  Our hope is that our commitment to satisfaction will one day earn us the "legendary" adjective applied to LL Bean.

As an aside, many people have asked if we're crazy.  They can't believe we would provide clients the unquestioned right to make any adjustment to our invoices they think appropriate.  As we have thought through the process, we can't believe everyone doesn't offer the same option.  We provide a service.  We believe we provide outstanding quality and value.  Why would we not stand beyond what we do?  We hope clients and prospects ask all of their service providers if they are confident enough to offer the Valorem promise.  The commitment to client satisfaction should not end just before the invoice is mailed.

Full post as published by In Search of Perfect Client Service on January 16, 2009 (boomark / email).