Management Experience

John Smith

MGT 416

Dr. Shruiller

May 26, 2013

Management and Organizational Behavior

It was usually busy Saturday in Burlington Coat Factory where I happen to be customer service supervisor. It is not a secret anymore that American capitalist system created consumerist society. Therefore, everything is about customers. Consumers’ right becomes more perceptible during holyday season where everyone tries to get the best deal possible. My task was simple and straightforward, probably the easies task in the store. All I was assigned to do is to make sure front end is providing high quality customer service. During holyday season my job were getting harder because sometimes I had to play a manager roll. One thing I learned from my retail store experience is that ability of critical thinking is required for customer service.

Throughout a day I had to explain our store return policy frequently. Customers tend to not accept that an item gets returned under certain conditions. For instance, there was a time limit and quality standard for returning items. Main problem that we were facing was return without receipt. In that case we were turning the item into store credit. It seems an easy system and all we had to do to follow the steps. However, it was getting harder when I had to figure out if customer actually bought the item and wants to return without receipt or grabbed from floor and attempts to makes some money. Store is relatively big, it has two floor and more then ten departments and it is impossible to recognize all the items.

Many customers already knew that during busy hours we rush in order to make the customer service faster so that is when most of the scams were happening. The system in store was very old. Scanning the barcode was not helping at all. Sometimes it showed that we don’t have the item when we had many of it or opposite.

Similar incident occurred on busy Saturday towards the end of my shift. Customer brought a bunch of clothing...