BCOM 3950: Foot Locker Employee Customer Service Guidelines

This report outlines customer service guidelines for Foot Locker employees, addressing concerns about service quality and customer feedback. It emphasizes the importance of investing in HR capabilities, employee training, and effective communication to enhance customer experience and resolve issues efficiently. The report suggests empowering employees, providing software training, and fostering a culture of knowledge sharing. It also highlights the need for product training and cross-cultural teaming to handle diverse customer needs, ultimately aiming to improve customer satisfaction and maintain Foot Locker's competitive edge. Desklib provides access to similar solved assignments and past papers.

Running head: CUSTOMER SERVICE GUIDELINES FOR EMPLOYEES
Customer Service Guidelines for Employees
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MEMORANDUM
From: Intern at customer service
To: Supervisor
Date: 16 February, 2019
Subject: Customer Service Guidelines for Foot Locker Employees
Summary
Foot Locker, Inc. is a global retailer of sports shoes and apparels driven by the core value of
striving ways to do best in its field (Footlocker.com, 2019). Although, the organization is
driven by the motive of serving quality services to customers for gaining competitive edge as
descried in Cusumano, Kahl and Suarez (2015), it has been noticed that customers are facing
difficulty with the services and likely to experience non-cooperation while launching a
negative feedback or operational assistance. Therefore, as an intern, concern is regarding lack
of professional training procedure and future of the customer service department.
Introduction
The job of customer service employees is to develop customer experience and Foot Locker
can capture the value by investing on HR capabilities (Yi and Gong 2013). There are
basically, three reasons to invest on enhancing customer experience as it helps to retain
customers satisfying them with the services and it helps in cross selling of various products.
A customer, if handled with indifference or rude behavior or faulty services, company’s sales
and reputation both will face immense risk in the long term. Employees must be trained and
efficient enough to deal with customer with patience and empathy. A result will be
considered as positive only if employees are exploring problems and learning with the
progression of time.

Ideal behavior with customers with negative feedback
A pledge has been raised on behalf of interns to determine policies which will reflect
positively towards professional services to customers and also will develop HR capabilities.
There is a need to understand individual problems of customers and skills to solve it or
handle it even midst of criticism as customers are coming with several negative feedbacks
and it is representative’s responsibility to deliver satisfaction regarding each factor. For doing
that, employees need to be empowered by authority which is possible only by simplifying
hierarchical structure. It is employees’ responsibility to find out the positive side of every
problem and convince customers to cooperate until solution comes. A definite good training
session helps to deliver the solution with deadline. In addition to that, according to Tan,
Benbasat and Cenfetelli (2013), to speed up the entire process employees need software
training also as the processes has become automated these days. Moreover, use of co-
browsing tools must be available to employees for amending issues quickly and it will help
them to track customers’ history as well.
Strengthening training and development policy
Besides, it has been noticed during training sessions people are engaging in personal interests
and less likely to engage themselves within process. Trainers must come up with processes
which are interesting and increase employee’s professional edge by developing their listening
skills. They have to learn patience as it requires great listening skills to understand and
deliver genuine solution. Moreover, interpersonal communication and developing culture of
knowledge sharing can offer them to enhance competency in handling customer. Employees
will be interested only if their individual motive balances with organizational objective;
therefore, more investment is required in field of employee development.
Channelizing information and effective communication
It would be helpful for employees if enough company and product information are shared
with CSR employees as their job is to handle the customers’ issues and deliver information.
According to Dhar (2015), product training and customer handling are two different aspect
which must be handled differently as well. Assessment is helpful to perceive employees
understanding of a particular product. The more employee will understand the purpose of the
product, the easier it will become to handle. Shipment problems, in case of wrong product
delivery or issues in cross cultural communication issues all can be resolved with shared
information. Cross cultural teaming is helpful for understanding different employee behavior
and orientation. In case any emergency arrives, suggestion is to make everyone capable of

handling jobs of customers’ service at least with basic training as problem can happen in any
sector. Departmental assistance is necessary while dealing with negative feedbacks.
Conclusion
The positive thing is that interns have already capable of predicting customers’ demand
which makes them capable of understanding the upcoming issues, which they have to handle.
It will help Foot Locker to avoid a relationship of mistrust and dissatisfaction with customers.
Acknowledging customer satisfaction, one of the major competitive edge Foot locker has a
need of brushing up the procedure of engaging employees to customer service training
levering their critical thinking and problem solving skills.

References
Cusumano, M. A., Kahl, S. J., & Suarez, F. F. (2015). Services, industry evolution, and the
competitive strategies of product firms. Strategic management journal, 36(4), 559-
575.
Dhar, R. L. (2015). Service quality and the training of employees: The mediating role of
organizational commitment. Tourism Management, 46, 419-430.
Footlocker.com. (2019). Retrieved from https://www.footlocker.com/
Tan, C. W., Benbasat, I., & Cenfetelli, R. T. (2013). IT-mediated customer service content
and delivery in electronic governments: An empirical investigation of the antecedents
of service quality. MIS quarterly, 77-109.
Yi, Y., & Gong, T. (2013). Customer value co-creation behavior: Scale development and
validation. Journal of Business Research, 66(9), 1279-1284.