Question

Ali recently became a manager at a local furniture store that employs three managers and 55 non- managerial employees. As larger furniture stores such as IKEA and Home Center are coming to the area, the owner is concerned about losing customers to competition based on the price of products.

The management team met and discussed their strategic response to this problem. The team agreed that if profit levels did not rise in the next few months, some employees would need be terminated. It was decided that the furniture store would compete using customized designs and better customer service. Ali’s responsibility was to train all non-managerial employees in good customer relation skills, and was given a budget of AED65,000 for this.

After contacting several training providers, Ali has narrowed down his options to the following three training programs:

Expert Trainers Inc.

Al Jumeirah Consultants

Al Areej Training Services

Training Program: How to Build Long-Lasting Customer Relations? Three-Day workshop for AED35,000

Method: Lecture, Group Discussion, and Activities

Maximum Trainees: 50 per session

Training Program: Customer Service Skills One-Day Seminar for AED8,000

Method: Lecture and Question-Answer Session Maximum Trainees: 70 per session

Training Program: Customer Satisfaction Training for Sales Staff Three-Day workshop for AED25,000

Method: Customized Simulations with Feedback

Maximum Trainees: 25 per session

Each of the three options has its own advantages and disadvantages. Ali has been comparing these three options and is unsure if he should pick one of these or go with a different approach altogether. At this stage he is not even sure if training the employees would even help.

Case Questions

4. What advice would you give Ali regarding the selection of an appropriate training program? Explain your answer.

Answer 1

An organization is majorly dependent on sales staff in this particular case or its employees for its sales and revenue. If the employees or staffs are more competent then product sales increases and more the staffs are trained the more they become competent and thus customer retention.

A company either can create a demand and come up with the product based on market research and analysis or , as in this case, can try to make the staffs so competent that their customer service is remembered and customer is inclined to visit the shop often and promote the shop through word of mouth.

So how does an organization have a competent staff? The answer to this is through training and upgradation, the way it is happening in technology.

In this case it becomes imperative to train the staff for customer service as the organization has to compete with a bigger and better brand and if the sale doesn't happen then probably they may have to shut shop thus a training in this case is a must.

Let us analyze. The budget is AED 65000 and the number of staffs to be trained is 55. If all the staffs are sent to training then a problem of shortage of staff will occur to help the customer when they visit the shop.

What is best suited here is that Ali should contact Al Jumeirah Consultant first and let the staffs take the one day training and have a fare outlook of what is missing in them and what needs to be done more to inprove their way of working for good of the organization. Thus with AED 8000 and one day to spend, the staffs can have an overview of a trained workers. Ali still will be left with AED 57000.

Benefit with one day session will be that as per the training method the staffs will be able to participate in question and answer session to remove the doubts that they may have after learning new things from the lecture.

Once this one day training has been done then the same staffs will be evaluated based on their work in the shop.

With AED 57000 still left as budget for training, Ali can utilise it later for another session with Expert Trainer Inc.

Ali will be better equipped after seeing who all can be trained further after seeing their performance after first one day training session.