Retail and Apparel Returns within Four Walls
L.L. Bean – RL Leaders for Over 90 Years
by Barb Wood and Mike Perkins
Customer Service through efficient returns management is a critical part of reverse logistics. In an increasingly competitive industry, L.L.Bean still stands out as the benchmark for customer service. Now a multi-channeled business, L.L.Bean continues to serve customers with knowledgeable employees who are highly customer-focused. Employees are trained to take the time each individual customer requires to feel valued - whether through the mail, on the phone, by fax, over the Internet or in the stores. Each employee's goal is to ensure customers a consistently superior service experience, no matter which channel they choose to shop. Every channel has been built on the L.L.Bean values of honesty, quality, dependability and a guarantee of 100% satisfaction. Full Article
Mike and Barb will be featured speakers at the Boston RL Seminar on August 15, 2006. Learn more about how L.L. Bean processes returns to achieve maximum customer satisfaction – register today!
The challenge of every Reverse Logistics Professional is to increase your corporate profits by improving the handling of your returns. Returns processing is made up of many people, processes and costs, so it can be a considerable challenge to assess where to focus your energies to ensure you can achieve the biggest return for time or money invested.
Looking for a job? The RLA Job Center is the perfect place for RL professionals to start the search. Companies involved in reverse logistics regularly post new positions. Recently posted:
With security software spending estimated at $50 billion globally in 2005, many organizations are clearly taking the problems of data privacy and identify theft seriously. However, while most companies have focused on preventing perpetrators from breaking into their organizations, there has been comparatively little attention on protecting information that leaves the company on retired information technology assets. In the reverse logistics process, managers who dispose of these assets in an uncontrolled manner place their organizations at risk of inadvertently disclosing sensitive information and/or violating a number of federal privacy laws. 
In almost every one of the approximately 300 million computers in the US there is some form of confidential information written on the disk drive contained within the computer. This White Paper discusses the current methods and strategies of disk drive data erasure at drive End-of-Life (EOL) and the relative merits of each method. 
The third stop of the Reverse Logistics Seminar Road Show, this past month in Indianapolis, gathered over 50 of the brightest reverse logistics minds. Attendees from over 33 different companies including Dell, The Home Depot, NCR, HP, ClearOrbit, Genco, Telamon, AT&T and Western Digital, just to name a few.
Three reverse logistics thought leaders, Mike Snell - NCR, Mark Wallace - AT&T and Laura McDougall - HP led the highly interactive morning sessions. Our speakers shared best practices on topics including "Collaborating with your RL Partners and Vendors", "Leveraging Carrier Systems to Dynamically Route Returns from Your Field Workforce" and "Using Returns to Feed Your Supply Chain".
Seminar attendees peppered the speakers with questions and shared experiences and strategies. After a highly engaging morning session, attendees enjoyed lunch and boarded the shuttle bus for the Genco sponsored Best Buy Repair and Returns Facility Tour. Strolling through this over 200,000 square foot facility, our attendees got a rare first hand view of one of the country's most efficient repair and returns facilities.
The afternoon sessions were just as engaging as ClearOrbit reviewed various examples of "Ambitious Market Development in the RL Sector" and a highly interactive Panel Discussion with the day's speakers.