A Chat with Fred Meyers, President & CEO, The Queensboro Shirt

CS: You credit that to the lower cost of acquisition and reactivation?

FM: Lower cost of reactivation and just overall operating efficiencies. The work we've done to integrate our Web site into our order processing system also. They've got to have great technology at Lands' End presumably. One time I was reading an e-mail they sent out to their customers describing a typical CSR day. She said, "I come into my desk each day and I log into the seven systems I need in order to track all of my orders." And she was bragging that their systems were so sophisticated. But we understand why should could be signing into seven systems, because we used to do that to. But we've integrated that all into one system now. I don't know if they've done that as well, but our order processing and our cost to process an order as we've moved to the Internet and e-mail has gown from $14 each to under $5. And that involves a lot of answering customer questions as well, not just order processing. That's our total customer service budget divided into revenues.