Tip Top Markets

The business is facing the issue regarding quality management of supermarkets located in the Southeastern United States. It was reported that Karen Martin being a manager of one of the stores was interrupted by a number of complaints from her clients, especially on Tuesdays. Thus, she took records of complaint from the customer service desk at her store. There are large amount of data which was figured out for the last nine Tuesdays in June and July. As examining, the data covers many problems mostly relating to price, employees, cleaning, quality and stock.

On July 15, they made some changes to decrease out-of-stock complaints checkout line and pricing problems, and enhance the maintenance. However, it seems to be even worse when these problems continued to occur in the last two weeks. They are listed in a greater number compared to that in the previous Tuesdays. Obviously, the problems are not solved. This shows the ineffectiveness of management in improving store quality. The report will provide a list of recommendations to address client complaints.

Basically, nine major recommendations are outlined for the store to tackle the issue. First, Tip Top Markets should identify their loyal suppliers, who could give them more time to pay their dues. Second, the business must keep their financial condition stable to pay off their dues on time. Third, they could get raw materials from local market and build a warehouse close to the supermarket. Fourth, they have to focus on giving customers the best quality of products with reasonable prices. Fifth, employees need to be provided with a proper training to improve their communication skills as well as deliver great and quick customer service. Sixth, the store must check the quality and expired date of the goods coming from suppliers, particularly meat products. Eighth, they have to maintain the record of inventory items to make sure that there will be no lack of required materials to meet the store’s demand. Ninth, it is essential to follow customers’ complaints and the records to satisfy their wants and needs.  Based on the given data, each problem is analyzed in detail below.

The data sheet indicates that 184 customer complaints are collected in the last eight Tuesdays. Some of them are similar, so those complaints could be categorized in eleven main problems:

The check sheet shows that the category has the most complaints is out of stocks while the category has the least complaints is employee problem. These data would be used to draw a Pareto chart that arranges categories from highest to lowest frequency of occurrence.