Lee Ann of L.L. Bean. So that's what she looks like!

Some people take really urgent calls for a living, like the 9-1-1 operators who have to try to get callers to do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. That’s a really hard job to live with.

Then there are people who make cold calls to try to sell things. Brian Hawkins in upstate New York was the manager of a call center like that for about two years, back when he was 27 years old. They would try to set up appointments with people to sell home security systems.

Brian is 33 now, and he said it was hard to keep people on the phone for even ten seconds. His job made every day interesting, especially the time he saw a squad car in front arresting his employees on drug charges. When you’re paying people $11 to $15 an hour, recruiting good staff is tough. He was even thinking about getting workers from the local prison.

But my job at L.L. Bean isn’t like that at all. It isn’t like a career that you have to worry about when you get home. My job is a lot of fun. It’s great to get to talk to people from all over the country. L.L. Bean reps are very friendly, so we hear a lot of great stories.

I might take 50 to 60 calls during a six-hour shift, and more than half the callers will ask about the weather in Maine. They all want to hear about the cold weather here, even if it’s a sunny day. People like to tell you how their grandfather brought them up to visit us in Maine! It’s definitely not a bother, though we’ve changed a lot since then. But it is a challenge when we have two lights on, a lot of people calling, and you don’t want to cut somebody off.

When I worked the second shift, which is the afternoon into the evening, I would get a lot of West Coast customers. Customers on the East Coast will ask you a couple of questions about a few items, but then they really like to talk.

There was one woman who worked in a library in Washington D.C. She had all kinds of questions about the tights we used to sell. But of course, she was talking to me about her cats and her library job. Some people are lonely and they want to talk. Every customer has a different experience and a different story.

A community of co-workers at the call center in Portland, Maine.

Customers do get very friendly, but I’ve never developed a friendship from talking to someone on the phone. There was a rep working with me during this past peak season. She was going to make a date with someone she met on the phone, but that’s weird, it doesn’t happen often. As far as I know, nobody has gone out with someone by meeting that way.

I don’t like to share a whole bunch personally about myself when I’m working. When people ask how old I am, I tell them I’ll be 34 for the 12th time—I just turned 46 this week. If somebody is ordering a dog bed, and if they mention they have the same kind of dog I do, I might let them know that. When my oldest son was in the Air Force, he was in Alaska for four years. So whenever I got a call from anybody near Anchorage, I’d ask them how things were going near the air base. At least now he’s in the same time zone.

I’ve been at L.L. Bean for about ten years. I started as a seasonal employee. We start to ramp up in August for peak holiday season. Back then, we had the old blue screen system, and we had to learn all the different “F” keys. It wasn’t as user friendly as it is now. It was about two solid weeks of training. Now you can learn it in three days. We have pictures we can see on line. We don’t have to keep the customers waiting while we’re finding the right catalogue.

It was a lot to learn. I’ll never forget the first call I took. It was such a nerve-racking thing. You’re so afraid, you’re working on navigating the system, you don’t want to make the customer repeat, and you want to listen to everything the customer is saying, you’re not quite sure where to go.

That customer ordered 12 wreaths, and we have to do the cards separately. I had to think of everything. I was glad he was really nice.

But my second call was from a gentleman who wanted to reorder a pair of jeans. I was looking but I couldn’t find them. He was really yelling at me, insisting that he got them from us three years ago. Finally I asked him to look at the label inside and he must have been red with embarrassment, because the tag said “Eddie Bauer.”

You want to understand why a customer might get very angry. The challenge is not to get angry back. You can do it. Sometimes they keep calling until they get a rep who will do what they want. But most of our customers are not like that. They’re reasonable. They appreciate our quality and our guarantee and our value.

Lee Ann says to let out a little of your personality.

Accuracy is huge. A rep can get very nervous. I remember one brand new rep three or four years ago. She just had tears rolling down her face. She was terrified to log in and start taking calls. I had her sit with me for a while so she could watch me. She gave it a good try, but I don’t think she made it through all of peak.

Some people are just not the type to answer the phones and communicate in a positive, upbeat manner, and use courtesy phrases like please and thank you. Some people think the job is no big deal, you’re just answering phones. But I’ve mentored reps so they don’t just focus on the computer system. You want them to let a little bit of their personality out.

I think of it like I’m having a conversation with my customer, and we’re ordering things together. But for some reps it is just too much to handle. They’re afraid they won’t be able to find the info the customer needs or they’ll do the wrong thing.

I grew up 20 minutes north of here. Before this I was an aerobics instructor. I worked in a gym. I got tired of that, but I liked the atmosphere of everybody being upbeat and positive. But I wanted to move on to L.L. Bean, because they are a very prominent employer, and I live five minutes away from this call center, which has over 200 people.

There are four call centers altogether. There are quite a few men, but most are women. We can see our neighbors in the next cubicles. When it gets a little bit slow, we can chat a little bit between calls. It’s great. That’s why it’s easy to sound and be happy when you’re helping customers. We have a real community feeling here.

I get paid very well for what I do. I don’t know of any other part-time job where I get flexibility and medical and dental and disability. You get premium pay for working from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. I would never do that; I love to sleep!

Photo on front page: United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division under the digital ID cph.3b00075