Assignment: Negotiation Exercise

From your experience with retail returns, what are the goals of the negotiation from the perspective of each party? What are Sara’s goals and objectives in her role as a returns employee? What are the goals and objectives of the customers that she meets in the returns department? Why are they different?

Our text book World Class Contracting [ (Garrett, 2007) ], describe negotiation as “a process between buyers and sellers seeking to reach mutual agreement on a matter of common concern through fact-finding, bargaining, and persuasion”; as technical as this definition sounds it applies to everyone and all walks of life. Everyone negotiates and everyone seeks resolutions through agreements. In fact we are born as individuals with different perspective or we view the world, as we daily interact with others we are often faced with perspectives that don’t always agrees with our. However for the sake of peace and cordial relationships, we have learned to adjust by giving, taking and coming into many different agreements on how to co-exist.

The assignment simulation is a negotiation scenario that takes place between two individual; an unsatisfied customers, who is wishing to return a product and Sarah a ‘Return Customer Services Representative’ of a high-end electronic store. This negotiation scene takes place in a retail environment, which is time sensitive with restraints that only allow a moment for a brief introduction of both parties and a chance to resolve the issues at hand, leaving both players with little chance to follow the expert advice on ‘how to successfully negotiate”. Such negotiation tactics includes but not limited to, “Know the big pictures, identify and prioritize objectives or research and know your opponent [ (Garrett, 2007) ]. Although scenario is in the moment, what moves these two individual beyond the research phase is the universal practice and understanding that a business patronage is golden and if a customer is unsatisfied with a product,...