Had a minor problem with an item I ordered from Lee Valley last week. Called their customer service today to get things fixed up.

  A human answered the phone
  He took my info got me switched to customer service
  She said OK, we'll send you a replacement, no worries.
  Took maybe 3 minutes.

Not once did I hear "press 1 to... your call is important to us, please stay on the line, current wait time is xxx minutes, have a nice day".

Thank you for great products, great service and great people!

Had a minor problem with an item I ordered from Lee Valley last week. Called their customer service today to get things fixed up.

  A human answered the phone
  He took my info got me switched to customer service
  She said OK, we'll send you a replacement, no worries.
  Took maybe 3 minutes.

Not once did I hear "press 1 to... your call is important to us, please stay on the line, current wait time is xxx minutes, have a nice day".

Thank you for great products, great service and great people!

Lee Valley = Great service, great people and great products

Must agree about Lee Valley Customer Service. I called to check on my backordered (ahem!) Vac-Sys System, and Elizabeth answered right away, and was thorough and helpful.

Also: I found out they not only have tools, but some neat stuff for kids! I ordered a couple of things for our granddaughters including a Brio mechanics set. Start 'em young!

My friend in the 1970s had a post WWII Luxo Lamp and the ballast had burned out. He wrote to Luxo in New York and they asked him to send the lamp to them to determine what ballast was required. 

They wrote back and apologized for the fact that the 40-year-old lamp required parts that were no longer in production.  So they replaced it with a brand new one.

With that experience in hand, I recommended a Luxo lamp when my needle-work-obsessed-mother needed a lamp with a magnifier. 

A couple of years later she dropped the lamp and cracked the glass magnifier.  She called Luxo and asked where she could get one and they said that they would get back to her, but please provide your full name and address.  A few days later a new magnifier arrived in the mail. 

I don't know if they are still so customer-oriented.  I inherited the Luxo lamp and the counterbalance springs are too tired to hold the head in place.  This morning I wrote to Luxo about buying new springs.  Let's see if they respond.

One of the advantages of producing high-profit products is that you are financially able and driven to keep customers at all costs. 

Lee Valley is not a discounter.  Their profit margins encourage excellent service.  But it is good to hear about anyway.

Agreed, customer service at Lee Valley is great. I ordered the elusive Festool VacSys and a set of additional heads (I'm not sure what to call them, attachments?). Because they have the heads in stock but not the VacSys they were preparing to ship the heads. A quick call to Lee Valley and I immediately got a human who understood my concern that if the VacSys was unavailable I'd have the heads and no platform to use them on. So Lee Valley reversed the credit card charges and put the heads on reserve and will ship the whole system (or not) when it comes available (fingers crossed).

Along the lines of above and beyond customer service I'd like to share one about TAIG Tools in Arizona. TAIG makes desktop lathes and mills that were originally used for small batches of parts for the aerospace industry. I have both a lath and mill and tons of accessories. In the mid 2000's I moved from Nevada to Denver and built a simple crate for the mill, which then sat in my unfinished basement while I was working on the living spaces in my condo. One afternoon I heard water running in the front bathroom (upstairs) and discovered my brand new low flow toilet tank had a crack. Water was running under the bedroom carpet, down the wall, and through the ceiling into the basement. I'm not sure what the odds of this were, but right under where the water was coming through the basement ceiling was the crate with the mill, and the top was off and the crate had filled with water.

So I cleaned up the mess and discovered the mill had rusted. I called TAIG and explained my unfortunate situation, asking if they could repair the mill. They said no problem, pack it up and ship it to them and they'd evaluate the necessary repairs. Being a woodworker I designed a better crate that held the mill securely in place, even with rotating levers to hold individual components in custom recesses. It was the nicest crate I'd ever made. Off it went to TAIG and then I waited for several weeks (I wasn't in a hurry) before calling them for a status report. After giving them my name they asked me if I had designed and made the crate, which of course I had. Well instead of repairing or refurbishing my old mill, which I had bought a decade before the mishap, they said they were sending me a brand new mill at no charge. Now that's customer service! There was no warranty, and they didn't need to do what they did. But they did keep my crate. ;-)

My friend in the 1970s had a post WWII Luxo Lamp and the ballast had burned out. He wrote to Luxo in New York and they asked him to send the lamp to them to determine what ballast was required. 

They wrote back and apologized for the fact that the 40-year-old lamp required parts that were no longer in production.  So they replaced it with a brand new one.

With that experience in hand, I recommended a Luxo lamp when my needle-work-obsessed-mother needed a lamp with a magnifier. 

A couple of years later she dropped the lamp and cracked the glass magnifier.  She called Luxo and asked where she could get one and they said that they would get back to her, but please provide your full name and address.  A few days later a new magnifier arrived in the mail. 

I don't know if they are still so customer-oriented.  I inherited the Luxo lamp and the counterbalance springs are too tired to hold the head in place.  This morning I wrote to Luxo about buying new springs.  Let's see if they respond.

One of the advantages of producing high-profit products is that you are financially able and driven to keep customers at all costs. 

Lee Valley is not a discounter.  Their profit margins encourage excellent service.  But it is good to hear about anyway.

I bought a Cullman camera tripod when I was in high school in the seventies.  It had these unique saddles that you'd screw onto the base of the camera that would affix to their proprietor saddle holders in their tripods. 

Ten years ago or so, I had lost one of the two saddles, and discovered that they long since ago decades prior were no longer selling their stuff in NA.  I contacted via email in Germany and they sent me out two free ones from across the pond.  A rarity indeed, not unsimilar to what a place like LV would do.