I rented a tux for a buddy's wedding a few month's back, and got a coupon for Men's Wearhouse. So I took the coupon and went 'back-to-school' shopping and bought a new sport coat for work. It had been quite a few years, and my old ones were starting to look threadbare…Anyhow, I loved the coat, an earth-toned Ralph Lauren houndstooth with really soft fabric, good fit. But I noticed after a few weeks it was starting to pill a bit, especially on the cuffs and arms, and after a month a half no amount of lint brushing was going to keep this coat from looking all-over shaggy. Like a yak.
So I called the Men's Wearhouse at the Mall of New Hampshire in Manchester, where I bought the coat, explained, and the manager said bring it in. I stopped on my way home from work. The manager looked at the coat, and then explained that this type of soft fabric was going to pill like that if you sat in a lot of cloth covered chairs at meetings or at your desk, wore the coat to drive in with cloth car seats, wore it on airplanes, etc., all of which I do. I figured the next thing he would say was, lint brush it with a Brillo pad and stop wearing it under all those conditions. Instead he asked one of the guys to bring out another coat, same maker, similar color and pattern, but made of a material he said would be more likely to stand up to my lifestyle.
"It's great," I said. "So what do we do?"
"We switch them," he told me. "That other coat's useless to you. Just a price tag hanging in your closet."
The two jackets were the same price, and he returned the original and gave me the new for an even swap – maybe two months after I bought the first one, hard worn to a frazzle but my coat-punishing, cloth-chair lifestyle, no receipt necessary(though my name was in the computer along with the purchase record).
I think my jaw dropped. I'd never heard of any clothing company besides LL Bean having such an accommodating returns policy. I told them so, and left certain I'd return when I needed something. I also left feeling good, because they'd treated me well, respectfully and made it seem like my satisfaction was their genuine concern. They exceeded any expectations I'd had when I walked in. You just don't get customer service like that too often anymore.
I don't know whether there's anything they could do with the old coat. But it probably doesn't matter. There's certainly a practical, dollars and cents business side to this story. I know that in some businesses, email marketing, for example, companies will pay pretty big bounties to marketers who deliver a click that converts to a customer who opens an account or makes a purchase, anywhere from $10 on up to $300 dollars or even more. It's the cost of acquiring a customer. And in this case, Men's Wearhouse certainly earned return business from me, likely dozens of years, as well as good word of mouth. They couldn't know that I also tend to write a blog post when I have rare, great customer service experiences, but that's certainly got some search marketing value to them as well. So it was hardly charity on their part to get me a new coat I was happy with, but it was darn good business. And that's what most of us are looking for from the businesses to which we return again and again.
Tags: customer service
