Walmart_and_Customer_Service

Running head: Wal-Mart Wal-Mart and Customer Service Dixie B. Kodet American InterContinental University Abstract This paper goes over some of Wal-Mart’s history and also some of their customer service responsibilities along with a few recommendations of changes that they could make to improve customer happiness. Making customer service the best it can possibly be is one of the missions that Sam Walton and his wife Helen saw as being one of the most important parts of their business. When they started the Wal-Mart business, they set forth their visions and mission statements and Wal-Mart has tried to stick with those statements from the 1950’s to present. With several other discount retail supply stores, Wal-Mart remains at the top because of their customer service and their ability to maintain the lowest prices possible. Customer service is still their main number one priority as it should be. Wal-Mart and Customer Service Wal-Mart is not my favorite store but it is a store that I go to a lot because you just cannot ignore their deals in store and online. They offer many customers deals that cannot be found at other stores for better prices. I do not completely agree with all of their store policies but as a whole, their policies are not bad. Sam Walton and his wife Helen owned many different variety stores during the 50’s and his theory of retail discount stores was started. Most people think that Wal-Mart opened around the same time that Kmart and Target which was about 1962, but Sam Walton traveled extensively during the early 50’s and studied the discount retail industry. He believed that the everyday consumer wanted a different type of store. He trusted in his vision and he and his wife Helen started the first Wal-Mart in Rogers, AK. All of the discount stores such as Kmart expanded during the 60’. There were only approximately 15 Wal-Mart stores started because Sam & Helen Walton financed Wal-Mart on their own in the beginning. Wal-Mart stock was not offered on the NYSQ until 1972 and with this infusion of capital; Wal-Mart grew to 276 stores and opened in eleven states by the end of the 70’s. In the 80’s, Wal-Mart took on the task of opening the first Sam’s Club-members store. In 1988 the first Supercenter opened showing a full line of groceries along with 36 other departments of merchandise. By 1989, 1,402 Wal-Mart stores were opened and 123 Sam’s Club stores were opened at varying locations. Sales grew from $1 billion in 1980 to $26 billion today. This shows a history of what Sam Walton and his wife grew without losing sight of their values and mission. Wal-Mart’s most basic value has always been, and always will be, customer service. (Walmart.com, n.d.) Walton’s vision was a wide variety of good merchandise, lowest prices possible, guaranteed satisfaction, knowledgeable services, friendly, convenient hours and above all a pleasant shopping experience. (Made in America, Walton, 1993). He also was known to say that a store exceeds your expectations, and you hate it when a store inconveniences you, gives you a hard time, or pretends you’re invisible. (Made in America, Walton, Sam, 1993). This is still true in this day. I believe that Wal-Mart is still following the original vision and mission statement of Sam Walton yet they are hurting in this economy with positions being cut that serve as customer service positions. If you go into any Wal-Mart, unless you shop in the middle of the night such as I often do, you will find long-lines and not enough open check-outs. This definitely hurts the customer’s response to wanting to go into the store. People would rather pay a little bit more at the smaller stores rather than waste their time. Wal-Mart now has on-line shopping. This is one of my favorite variables of shopping. You cannot go wrong with their shipping prices. I have always been a price checker and remember the prices of everything I look at or research. Following a specific brand is not always my approach. I stick with brand loyalty in only a couple of items such as certain food items, tennis shoes and my blue jeans. However, when shopping for other items, I do not tend to be brand specific. Wal-Mart has a fairly good store brand on most things, such as household items, bedding, and groceries among just a few. As far as electronics, they do carry several of the top brands at a very low price. Some of these brands you cannot even get for this price if you go directly to the retailer such as their computer brands of Dell and Hewlett-Packard. Wal-Mart’s customer service has definitely fallen in the past decade in my belief. As I mentioned earlier, long checkout lines is a burden for anyone. Waiting for 3-4 other people with a cart full of items does cut into the busy lives that most of us have. However, when it is your turn, seldom do you meet a check-out person that isn’t friendly and accommodating. Wal-Mart offers many items at low prices and they offer many sales at various times of year one of them being the huge sale they offer at Christmas time. They cut prices to the minimum to get people in the door during those busy hours and you can often find the parking lot full and people waiting everywhere trying to get into the store. I believe Wal-Mart would show growth if they were to have 2-3 of these types of sales during the holidays rather than one day of 5-8 hours all at one time. It would be worth it to them, to offer sales that are almost as good starting once every week from Thanksgiving to Christmas. People buy things early for Christmas especially with the economy the way it is. They price shop a lot more. However, when a store has a sale on several items, not many people go to the store and end up buying just that one item. They almost always walk past something that they need or something that shows another sale price and they see it as a chance to pick up yet another gift or item that they need. Wal-Mart has a fairly good policy on returns and their customer service people are usually friendly, however after Christmas, I believe they should offer 2-4 days where they bring in all of their customer service return people, and maybe offer free coffee or a tasty treat that they are selling in their store for their customer’s to have while they wait in line to return certain items that they do not need, got double of, or need to return for a different size. This is always a sore spot after the holidays. They could open up numerous counters and registers just for returns and not demand receipts but as long as the item has a Wal-Mart tag on it and has not been used, it could be returned. After all, if the product was bought at Wal-Mart those numbers of each item would be in the Wal-Mart computer system and would just have to be scanned again. If it doesn’t work, or has been used, then the item should require a receipt and be helped at other aisles. However, if they had 2-4 special days for only returns of items that weren’t opened or needed a different size, people could just go into the store, return the item and grab the item that interested them instead or get their money back. If I have to return something, usually I just want a different color or size or another product. I avoid returning things sometimes just because of all the nonsense a person has to go through. If I had things to return, I would definitely like it if I could return it on a special day when I know there will be enough customer service people handling the crowd and if there was another sale on other products, I would definitely stay to shop more. My mother has for several years had a habit of leaving tags on Christmas gifts because she isn’t always familiar with sizes for everyone or exactly what they want. It is not like what we did as kids, where we wrote our lists with the brand names and sizes of what we wanted. She leaves the tags on but for her to give us the receipt (which she usually does) she may have to make several many copies. Most items in the store have a sticker on them in this day and age and those stickers are scanned. If the item has its original tag on it, then Wal-Mart could agree to make an exchange in the store for a person without the receipt. People could have a blast doing this because they would be getting exactly what they wanted without the hassle and Wal-Mart could definitely make this a much more fun time for people having to go through the mundane process of exchanging a gift. They could have lines labeled with all kinds of things or they could give out tags as people come into the store and hand them a tag for an exchange saying “wrong color”, “wrong size”, “wrong brand” “need exchange” or even “to many of the same things.” If they specialized their holiday returns in the same way they handled their big holidays sales, it could make this very mundane thing of standing in line wondering how much grief they are going to give you because you don’t have the receipt yet you didn’t even open the package and it is stamped Wal-Mart all over it. Having 2-4 special days of “holiday exchange” and advertise those days along with their sales, put on extra people and extra lines just for this, it would definitely bring in more people and this whole process of exchange could be done in a much shorter amount of time and much more efficiently. In exchange, it would make customers much happier and of course customers would talk about the happy experience, growing word of mouth advertising and keep Wal-Mart growing by leaps and bounds each year because their customer service would shoot through the roof. One last thing that could make Wal-Mart a better store by keeping customers a lot happier, is by having more of their sales items in stock. When they throw a major sale, people rush to the store and even rush online to buy a specific item and the item is already gone. This definitely displeases customers and they walk away severely disappointed. Having to wait for an item that you specifically wanted because it is not in stock and you can’t get it for an extra 2-4 weeks is very disheartening. A customer is much more apt to just walk out of the store and walk into the closest other discount retail store and buy there. Wal-Mart offers online shopping and it is terrific. Their website does not take a long time to load, they track your order, their shipping methods can’t be beat, and they email you times and dates of when to expect your order and they follow up the order by asking a person to do a quick survey of the item they purchased. Wal-Mart offers a Customer Community where people can rate the products they purchased at Wal-Mart. They rate the products in different areas and then can write comments about that item. People really write in-depth replies on items and it definitely helps a person to make a choice between two items if one has a 5 star rating and the other has a 3 star rating yet they are similar price. This has helped me in the past numerous times and I specifically look for those typed comments people make on the products. It is kind of a Wal-Mart Facebook spot. Almost all of their products online offer this rating that other customers gave the product. It is a great way to get ideas from other customers. Wal-Mart also shows on their website the other items you have looked at and if shopping for a particular item, they show several other products that other customers purchased that may be similar to what you might be shopping for. References: Corporate, W. (2010). Walmart Corporate Home. Retrieved January 14, 2011, from Walmart Corporate: http://walmartstores.com/ Kerin, R. A., Hartley, S. W., & Rudelius, W. (2011). Marketing (Vol. 10). (D. Hughes, Ed.) New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Irwin. Walton, S. (1993). Made in America. Rogers, AK, USA: Bantam.