Customer Service Training Manual The Ultimate Beauty Center has had a relatively successful existence and share of the market in South Bend, Indiana for 12 or so years. It has its own tastefully-designed building with modern equipment and machinery, which have attracted an increasing number of customers from adjacent towns and states. From a simple slimming shop, it grew into a center with three other departments, supplementing slimming services: hair, nails and facial care. It was previously owned by a mother-and-daughter team who observed conservative business practices.. The Center has an overall personal complement of 60, serving an average of 30 customers and walk-ins daily.

Because of its growing volume of clients, the owners decided to open a Customer Services (CS) department, directly under the owner., to handle public queries and information, promotional campaign, media and public relations, and internal MIS arm. This experimental CS department has been operating for almost two years with a full-time staff of 10 as frontline staff.

In the last few months, the CS department has encountered problems. Out of over-eagerness to sell one of its costlier but newer slimming products, it exaggerated certain claims and a regular customer complained that the product failed to deliver promised benefits. At the hair department, a hair stylist accidentally wounded and burned a portion of a customer's scalp and temple while giving her a treatment. Instead of palliating, the CS staff went into a physical battle with the injured customer for slapped the stylist. At the facial department, another customer complained against a consultant who disfigured her nose. And at the nail department, news came out that one of its regular clients was found positive for HIV-AIDS by the local health bureau.

All the blunders occurring almost successively, the owner called in her younger daughter working in New York as a manager and offered to relinquish the full ownership of the Center to her. The mother has, for years, contemplated on retiring early, while the daughter with whom she has teamed up got married and settled down in Europe with her husband to open their own business there. At present,...

It also includes damage control measures in case of failure or other eventualities, such as those that the Center is currently undergoing.
Setting

South Bend has a population of less than 110,000 or less than 50,000 families. The Center is located well within visible distance from the spacious Wal-Mart and Myers areas. Customers are mostly women, from young adolescents to retirees. The Center is jointly owned by the mother-daughter team and offers slimming, hair, nail and facial care services with a regular staff of 60.

The team has, in the previous years, tried to manage the business on its own methods until it came upon the idea of a CS from business associates.

History and Background

The widowed owner was herself a successful beautician from her youth. Through marriage, she pursued the career until she was widowed when her younger daughter (who studied, worked and lived separately from them in New York) was graduating from high school. By then, the widow already had a following in this community and her parlor sent her two girls through college. The older daughter developed the same flair for beauty, while the younger one was more adventurous and independent and decided to be on her own in the Big Apple. The business expanded to cover 4 areas of service when the mother-daughter team thought they needed an in-house public relations arm, the CS. They decided to put up such a department on an experimental basis for 2 years. In those 2 years, the problems occurred, driving the owners to consult with their legal counsel and the daughter in New York.

The initial CS staff was chosen from those recommended by friends. It had no department head at the start and functioned…