Innovative Success Story: L. L. Bean

ISI Helps L.L. Bean Provide Superior Customer Service

Thanks to technology, ordering from the L.L. Bean catalog is fast, efficient, and easy-- precisely the way Bean's customers want it.

A staff of 3,600 telephone representatives on-hand at peak periods enables L.L. Bean to answer customer calls — as many as 180,000 a day — on the first or second ring. Customers who have ordered before are located by name on the company's Customer Marketing System and their billing and shipping addresses are confirmed. Then the operator enters credit card information, asks for the item numbers, colors, and sizes, verifies their availability, establishes a delivery date, and voila! The whole transaction typically takes fewer than three minutes.

At the heart of each call is a corporate practice that guarantees customer satisfaction from the moment the toll-free telephone number is dialed, through the life of the merchandise ordered. This principle dates back to 1912, when Leon Leonwood Bean founded the Freeport, Maine-based mail order company. Then and now, the company specializes in outfitting customers for the "Great Outdoors."

In the early days, when the Maine Hunting Shoe was the only product Bean made, customers were easy to track and often received a personal sales pitch or thank-you from Mr. Bean's typewriter. Today, there are 16,000 Bean products and over 4.5 million customers worldwide. Yet each of Bean's customers is still known to the company via a centralized repository of customer information that Innovative Systems helps Bean keep clean and accurate.

L.L. Bean's Way
"We want to make sure customers get exactly what they want and, therefore, we have to know who they are, where they live, and what they like," says James Beckwith, programmer analyst for Bean. "We can't convince customers we have their best interests at heart if there are five files in our system with the same name. Even the best trained operators can't get through a clutter of names without offending
the customer."

To support customer satisfaction and service, and contain the costs of catalog distribution, Bean launched an extensive customer information management project. One objective was to eliminate duplication of customers based on a wide variety of parameters proprietary to Bean, in addition to customer name and address data. Another objective was to focus on individual customers rather than households.

"If we miss customers or combine names that shouldn't be combined, we end up not sending catalogs to people who want to buy our products," Beckwith explains. "The reverse is just as bad, due to increasing postal costs. If you send two catalogs to a household and only one is used, then money is wasted. Even a small percentage improvement in accuracy means a lot of dollars saved."

Facilitating Bean's clean-up project are several ISI products, including its standardization, editing, and household linking capabilities. ISI also provided technical assistance and training to assist Bean's systems and marketing staffs.

Customers Come First
"We have a special way of doings things here," Beckwith begins, "because many of our customers have special needs."

There are "households" in Bean's customer base, for example, in which spouses with the same last name and address have told Bean they don't share the L.L. Bean catalog. Consequently, Bean sends two: one for her and one for him. In addition, many Bean customers have names and titles that are longer than the standard, and addresses that contain more than the typical number of lines.

Since matching and householding processing that would accommodate and recognize such distinctions is important to Bean, Beckwith worked closely with ISI to implement its standardization, editing, linking, and householding systems. During the implementation process, Bean developed several user-defined parameters with ISI's help. One, for example, helped Bean reduce manual review time by allowing Beckwith to choose when the system should consider financial terminology as matching criteria. This activity was designed to accommodate Bean customers with first names like "Will" or "Ira," or last names like "Trust" or "Keogh."

The teamwork paid off. Diagnostic testing revealed that L.L. Bean's database was cleaner than any database ISI had analyzed in more than 30 years of business. Using ISI's sophisticated linking software, Bean achieved a link rate of 99.42 percent — substantially higher than the standard benchmark of 98 percent. Standardization-related errors occurred in fewer than .54 percent of records on the L.L. Bean database, while 1.5 percent is the quality standard.

One Name at a Time
The high link rate achieved using ISI’s linking capability set the stage for the next step: householding.

With the first run of ISI's household linking capability, Bean achieved a correction in the vicinity of seven percent — a substantial savings for a company that sends 140 million catalogs annually.

The team of L.L. Bean and Innovative Systems also collaborated on "extra parameters designed to bring together records that reflect the L.L. Bean definition of a household," Beckwith says. "We now have total freedom to match any kind of data we want."

Simultaneously, the cataloger began using ISI's online householding search engine to enable Bean to compare each new customer to its household.

"I wanted to be able to evaluate new customers one at time to see if there's an existing household they belong to," Beckwith says. "Timeliness is very important. In batch mode, it could take weeks to find the answer. We need to know who the person is and what group he or she belongs to now."

"With the online piece Innovative Systems created," says Beckwith, "we're able to achieve the desired results."

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