Go to p. 396 in your text and answer the questions in Situation 3. Directions: You may use two (2) quotes in your report, each no more than one sentence in length. Ensure your report meets all of the following criteria: A minimum of 700 words– your name, class number/title, date, etc. and references do not count in determining word count Double-spaced Times New Roman, 12 pt font size Upload your report as a Word document or rtf file. situation 3 Jay Goltz owns a Chicago-based decorative frame company, Artists Frame Service, and three other businesses. And in his mind, customer service today is more important than ever. “Smiling and being pleasant is not enough,” Goltz observes. He goes out of his way to hire great employees and trains them to handle even the most challenging questions and service requests. Then he goes a step or two further by making the following claims on his company’s website: • Our framing consultants have art backgrounds and an average of ten years of experience in the industry. • We offer an extraordinary selection of frame mouldings sourced personally and passionately from around the world. • We take framing seriously. It’s about details, higher standards, and meeting our own level of expectation. • With a huge inventory and a large staff of artisans, we get the job done when you need it. We deliver on this promise. To ensure that all goes as planned, Goltz keeps extensive documentation on every job. If complaints arise, he can figure out what happened and deal with the problem quickly. Taking this approach, he can tell if a customer’s dissatisfaction stems from, say, an employee’s carelessness, inadequate equipment, or some other problem. If the cause is an employee’s poor workmanship, Goltz will provide coaching to help improve that associate’s performance. After that, if the problem still is not solved, the employee is fired. As Goltz sees it, “The company’s first mission isn’t having employees, it’s staying in business. Customer service is the main advantage small businesses have over their big competitors, so you have to get that right—no matter what it takes. Question 1 As a long-run strategy, will Goltz’s approach to superior customer service quality be successful? Question 2 Would you want to work for a company with such policies? What would be the pros and cons of working there? Question 3 What suggestions would you have for Goltz? Can you see any ways to improve his system?

 

Small Business Management

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Small Business Management

Over the years Artists Frame Service headed by Jay Goltz has been able to offer excellent customer service. In addition, the company has employees who have excellent knowledge of the needs of their customers and have demonstrated efficiency and consciousness towards those needs. The company has achieved all this through maintaining a detailed documentation of each customer’s transactions and each employee’s job (Longenecker, Petty, Palich, & Hoy, 2016). Working for such a company has both the disadvantage and advantages to the employees and the company in general. The company should find more effective ways of disciplining their employees to ensure the satisfaction of the employees, customers and the company in general.

The strategy of the company for ensuring that their customer experience is accurate entails hiring great workforce and training them on how to handle difficult situations, questions, and requests from the clients. The framing consultants working with the company’s website have exceptional experience in molding frames passionately and personally according to the clients’ preference. For detailed and quality services Goltz records a detailed documentation of each job performed by the employees (Mader-Clark & Guerin, 2016). This is because he desires to get to know the cause of any issue arising from customer transactions with the employees of the company so that he can deal with the issue promptly. If the cause of the customers’ dissatisfaction is the employees he coaches them to help improve their performance and if the problem is not solved he fires the concerned employees.

This approach of staying in business through the provision of excellent customer service is likely to be successful as a long-run strategy. A satisfied customer is likely to relay their experiences with the company to their potential customers. A dissatisfied customer is likely to relay negative information about the company concerning their experiences to more people than the satisfied customer (Spotts, 2014). Therefore, it is significant for the organization to maintain excellent customer relations as the customer is the major determinant of the success or failure of the company.   

The policies Goltz set up in his company gives no opportunity for errors. This can affect the company and the employees positively or negatively.  The benefit of working for such a company is lack of indecision about the roles of the employees in ensuring the success of the customer transactions and the long run success of the company. In addition, the constant communication and room for coaching in case of an issue gives the employees an opportunity to work effectively in ensuring that they maintain the customer service efficiency constantly (Spotts, 2014). The main disadvantage of such a policy is that the employees are given only one chance to err. Making a mistake or making a customer be dissatisfied leads to termination of work. This will eventually not go well with the company as more employee turnover is likely to be reported in the company. Also, the company will be affected negatively as the move will present a negative perception of the company to other employees and the customers of the company.  

The likely outcome of such a policy would be more time spent on interviewing the possible candidates. On the other hand, the few employees remaining will be under pressure in order to maintain the production level and the satisfaction levels of the customers. Also, the work morale of the employees who will be remaining will go down making it impossible to deliver exceptional customer service. According to (Longenecker, Petty, Palich, & Hoy, 2016), no specific type of leadership style is fit in any of the company’s situations.

The recommendation for Goltz to improve the leadership style is making changes in the disciplinary policy of the company. The employees should be given a verbal warning when they make mistakes and offered an opportunity to discuss the cause of the problem and given a second chance to correct their mistakes. In case the employee repeats the same mistake he or she should be offered a written warning. If the employees seem not to change or improve after the verbal and written warning is given to them, they should then be subjected to termination. Consequently, the morale of the employees would be enhanced and Goltz will keep the turnover levels of the employees lower. The productivity of the company will then increase the customers will be more satisfied leading to the general success of the company.

 

Longenecker, J. G., Petty, J. W., Palich, L. E., & Hoy, F. (2016). Small Business Management: Launching & Growing Entrepreneurial Ventures. Cengage Learning: Cengage Learning.

Mader-Clark, M., & Guerin, L. (2016). The Employee Performance Handbook: Smart Strategies for Coaching Employees. ‎Berkeley: Nolo.

Spotts, H. E. (2014). Revolution in Marketing: Market Driving Changes: Proceedings of the 2006 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference. New York: Springer.