Customer Service 101

Hello Readers, 

Today lets talk about how to provide good customer service. This is like a survival manual on how to survive retail. 

First: Always remember to have a smile on your face

-This is key for customer service because that smile welcomes the customer, it is like greeting the customer with a big warm hug.

Second: Always remember to greet the customer

-Sure sometimes the customer may walk up to the register without saying anything but it is your responsibility to greet the customer. A simple hello or How are you might lighten up the mood and help the customer to have a much better experience

Third: If you so happen to not be in the register, but instead you are walking the floor, always remember to assist customers

-If you see a customer in need of help, maybe he or she may not want to ask for assistance, but it is up to you as the associate to reach out to the customer to see what is it that he or she may need. This leads to a much satisfactory experience for the customer. 

Loss Prevention Continued

In a prior post I had taken a deeper look into Loss Prevention, a destructive problem in retail because the store has to figure out how to compensate for those loss of merchandise. 

According to Wikipedia , 

Retail loss prevention is a set of practices employed by retail companies to preserve profit. Profit preservation is any business activity specifically designed to reduce preventable losses. A preventable loss is any business cost caused by deliberate or inadvertent human actions, colloquially known as "shrinkage”.

I had disagreed with this description in a sense and added my own interpretation so that the quote would state,

Since retail loss prevention is geared towards the elimination of preventable loss^[2] and the bulk of preventable loss in retail is caused by deliberate human activity, traditional approaches to retail loss prevention have been through visible security measures matched with technology such as CCTV and electronic sensor barriers. Most companies take this traditional approach by either having their own in-house loss prevention team or using external security agencies. Companies have also developed newer and more efficient ways to prevent loss of their merchandise. In some cases the loss prevention officers will walk the floor dressed like a regular shopper in order to observe those who may seem suspicious. This new method gives the loss prevention team the opportunity to catch the thief red handed. it offers the element of surprise. 

I believed the quote needed more embellishment because it was lacking in certain areas such as the fact that there are plain clothes loss prevention officers actually walking the floor. Instead of walking the floor with a badge like 

This fact is unknown to the regular shopper and the common thief. I actually went back and visited the Wikipedia page which I edited and to my surprise my changes were gone. Maybe there is a Wiki team which works to remove the edits of the regular reader like myself.

Saturdays or Mondays?

Today i decided to revisit a previous post, Retail problem #2 popped in my head which is working on Saturdays. My first posting described the horrible emotion which comes along with waking up on a Saturday because I mean who wants to work on a Saturday? 

But i started to look at this from another side and decided to comment on it. There are other jobs outside of retail such as the corporate world which provides the luxury of having weekends off. From the outside this seems spectacular especially to a retail worker, but in all reality this may not be the better option. The grass may not be greener on the other side. I mean would you rather work all week and have two days off or have a rest in between those working days?

I guess this is up to your own preference, to each their own. But looking at the other side, I’m thinking that maybe having a Monday or Wednesday off might be a nice luxury as well. Saturdays are still horrible in retail just because of how packed the store becomes and the amount of the stress that arises as the lines get longer. 

So what is the solution to all this? If i had to make a choice, in a perfect world I would be able to have Mondays and Saturdays off but this is not a perfect world. 

Minimum Wage?

  Wages have become another problem in retail but it is the big elephant in the room. Not many like to talk about it and if they do it is in hushed words. Those that do talk about it more aggressively are normally the bolder workers who have been with the company for an extended period of time. 

 The problem with wages in retail is that workers do not seem to be paid well.

Especially since they are expected to work hard just like another job. This problem  is not unique to retail though. Other institutions also struggle with under paid workers. Lately though there have been an increase in wages among retail outlets. For instance Target has been recorded to have recently increased the wages for its workers. 

 According to the article,Target Increases Minimum Wage , it has been reported that Target increased the wages of its workers to $10 an hour. The article also states that Target chose to make this decision after the Fight for Fifteen movement was gaining traction among retail workers. This movement demands the minimum wage to be increased to $15 an hour. Clearly this was too expensive of an increase for Target and they settled with just an extra $1 an hour. 

 I think shame on you Target and shame on you retail stores who are still underpaying their workers despite the fact that these businesses are successful and can afford to pay their workers much better. 

Baking meets Retail

Although I normally focus on problems in retail, today I decided to look into another topic which is baking. I know it is in no relation to what I normally post but after I read a post from a fellow blogger which I follow ,  I found this post to be so well written and interesting I had to share it and comment. 

The blog is sugarkisses1.blogspot.com and the post is titled Sweet Little Earths. This post caught my eye because at first I thought what a weird title. But actually going into and reading the post was like being transported into a different world, the world of baking. 

I am not a baker myself but I do have a huge sweet tooth, probably too big. If you really know me, on countless occasions you will see me eating a cookie or a cupcake. Anything sweet will become my best friend. But back to the post. In this posting, the author describes a new trend in baking called geode inclusions which is made from rock candy. From the pictures it looks spectacular. But this is actually something I’ve never heard of before. The blogger provides details of how to actually make rock candy and from the description it seems like it can be made in multiple fashions. The first is described as very time consuming and involves a long process of actually growing the rock candy crystals from scratch. The other ways are much easier options such as simply breaking up hard candy. Although I may never try this myself just because baking is not my specialty I will definitely introduce this concept to my friends who have more of a knack for things like this. 

If you would like to read the post more, here is the link: Sugarkisses

Sensors!

SENSORS! Everyone knows about them but not many understand the true nature of these objects. Although they are meant to protect our merchandise somehow they tend to do other things. Stores place these objects on their clothes or other items to prevent stealing. But sometimes they can end up hurting the wrong people. For instance they poke us. Us meaning retail workers.

On more than one occasion I have personally been poked by a sensor and it is a very hurtful experience. No one talks about how sharp they are. They only seem to mention that sensors function solely for helping the store. But if that needle happens to poke you, the pain feels like a bee sting times ten. The sensors must be removed from the clothing properly in order to prevent this outcome.
Yet despite how technology advances and the new machines which have been developed to assist in the removal of sensors, workers still find themselves stopping to say Ouch! countless times a day.

Pain does not only occur when taking off the sensors. Applying sensors can also be an ouch moment. For instance some stores instruct their workers what is the right way to put the sensors on. Sensors normally have ink enclosed in them so that they cannot be tampered with. If they are tampered with the ink will burst and destroy the merchandise, therefore defeating the purpose of trying to steal in the first place.


The basic point of this retail problem is that even though they are small, don't mess with sensors. Big things really do come in small packages in this case. Although they are small, they pack a huge punch in the form of the ink that bursts and can destroy the clothes or the sting that occurs if a retail worker mistakenly pokes him or herself with the sensor