Backwoods Mail Order Company case
Submitted By:
Group 1, Section A
Case Background:
Backwoods is a mail order company that is into camping supplies and outdoor clothing. Gerald Banks, the operations manager of the customer service division, is interested in training his 40 employees in the customer orders group to be more effective in handling customer complaints and problems. The organizational structure is as follows:
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The customer orders division has 40 employees and four supervisors whereas the shipping division has 32 employees and 3 supervisors. The employees are evenly divided into two shifts – A day shift and a night shift.
The customer orders division is responsible for recording customer orders and check availability of each item ordered. The orders are then transferred to the shipping division which is in charge of ensuring the product is shipped to the customers.
The constraint to be kept in mind before designing the training program is that service should not stop to their customers. The problems as identifies by a needs assessment specify that majority of the errors resulting in merchandise return is because of incorrect entry of size in the computer.
Based on this the goals of the training program include reducing merchandize returns and creating a positive image of backwoods in the minds of its customers and employees.
Questions
1. Write several clear, measurable objectives for the training to be delivered to the employees in the customer order group.
The needs assessment output indicates problems to be addressed according to the organizational and task analysis. Before setting measurable outputs, the company first needs to perform person analysis as well to identify whether there are some employees who are excellent with certain attributes but lack at certain different aspect.
Since the customer order group is the main point of contact for the customers, it is imperative that the quality