NU 12 - What pisses you off at the mall? What do you suggest? KC

Hi Sir,

Here is my 3rd blog entry for NU 12.

Thank you!

--Kathleen Crisostomo

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Crisostomo, Kathleen Lizette C.

ENTREP

NU 12: What pisses you off at the mall?  What do you suggest?

DISCLAIMER: I know nothing about mall operations.  I'm just a customer. J

The urban Filipino's pastime is going to the mall.  I work along Ayala Avenue and Greenbelt 5 is just at the back of our building.  Whenever I get stressed, I just take a stroll until I reach The Landmark, Glorietta or even SM Makati.  Window shopping has been painful during economic struggles but has kept me dreaming on what to do with the spare money I have when I receive my next paycheck.

Instead of focusing on how a mall looks like, I picked out a particular mall and focused on their department store unit: The Landmark Makati.  My wallet develops an increased spending power here compared to its posh neighbors and can even compete with prices of those in Divisoria.  This however does not come without a price.  I started to wonder, is customer service indirectly proportional to prices in the mall?

An expatriate friend from the UK told me that whenever she buys shoes at the Landmark and asks for another size, she needs to wait for 30 minutes before she receives a response.  "There is a bigger chance you will not see the sales person ever again.  It's like they are just waiting for you to get tired of waiting and to leave", she said.  True enough, it does take long for us to wait to get some feedback considering the number of sales personnel.  If you make a follow-up with other sales personnel, they will tell you it is not under their jurisdiction and you should just wait for the one who looked for your pair of shoes.  This happened to me several times already and is the main reason why I don't buy shoes there no matter how dirt cheap they are.

With the number of trinkets being sold and left as is within the department store, it is very easy to shoplift in The Landmark.  Just to clarify-- no, I did not shoplift and I do not intend to.  I'm just wondering why only the south sea pearls are kept in glass shelves while the hair accessories and jewelries are displayed as is with few sales personnel monitoring the number of customers who try them on.  Unnoticed theft of these small items could probably sum up to the worth of the south sea pearls.  It made me wonder about their security system since it is easy to step out of the mall and move to the next establishment.  To get feedback from another mall, I have spoken with a saleslady from SM.  She told me that their branch's strategy to combat shoplifting is to hire tall sales personnel.  I was astounded.

The sales people need some serious customer service training.  Yes, the job is tiring and repetitive and they will need to encounter customer complaints.  I understand that the market being catered at The Landmark is not the same market being catered in Rustan's, and I also do not expect them to act posh.  However, they are still the front liners in the mall and this mall is still in Makati CBD.

On normal circumstances in the mall, the price of an item is indicated on a sticker/tag along with its bar code.  When you reach the counter, the cashier scans the barcode and the item details flash on the screen.  If there is a problem, the cashier requests assistance from someone who can get a similar item, looks for the item personally, or contacts her supervisor.  My biggest problem with The Landmark occurs just when I am about to pay for the item.  The manual encoding system of purchases has become a headache.  You cannot just get an item and pay in the nearest counter.  The sales person in charge needs to give you first a purchase slip which you have to present to the counter before you can pay for the item, or worse, before you retrieve your item from the sales person.  The sales transaction will not occur without this piece of paper.  The price is then encoded manually.  I bought a ribbon from the ground floor once but had to buy a lot of other items in the fourth floor.  When I reached the counter, they would not process the payment because I need to go back to the ground floor and to get the purchase slip from a missing sales person.  In the end, I no longer purchased the ribbon even if that was the reason why I went to the mall in the first place.

Proposed Solutions:

My biggest problem in Landmark is the easiest one I can find a solution to.  They just need to upgrade their POS (point of sale) system.  Similar to how manufacturing companies work, if they are able to scan the barcode of an item then it should automatically be deducted from the number of supplies listed.  This will make inventory management easier for all their vendors and will make the payment transaction process more efficient.  In a world turning paperless, the company should void away from using handwritten purchase slips.  If a purchase slip is still needed, it can be done electronically while cashiers receive the alert in their system.  POS systems maybe expensive but would add value in the long run.

In line with the POS system, with a more efficient DBMS (database management system), sales personnel should be able to check if there are still available stocks in the inventory.  This will cause them not to spend 30 minutes looking for a size 7 pair of black Janylin pointed pumps while another customer is requesting for a size 9 of the same product in green.

I trust that The Landmark's security system is better than what I have initially thought of but they do have to work on securing their items.  People shop like crazy at The Landmark weeks before the Christmas party season because of several items which can be used as gifts and all those pens, magnets, keychains and figurines are just spread out in a table.  They don't need to keep these items on a glass case like the south sea pearls but some form of rearrangement will do.

The biggest thing to change will be the intangible problems, such as culture.  As I learned in HUMRES, in order for you to change the culture, you have to change the artifacts.  The front liners should definitely be trained for better customer service orientation.  Now that The Landmark is going through renovation, this is a good time to also renovate the culture of their people.  This will make them more competitive as they will have low cost items with better service.

I have to admit that I have visited The Landmark Trinoma just once and realized it was quite different from the one in Makati.  I hope the culture there infects the renovation of their Makati branch. 4 < you can now run a dept store>