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Advantages Of Nordstrom

Decent Essays

Company & its Strategy: The Company Philosophy to offer the Customer best in service, Selection, quality and value was the competitive advantage of Nordstrom in being no 1 in implementing the High-service strategy as its Key success factor and being the Gold Medalist in National Retail Merchants Association.
To be able to sustain the competitive advantage Nordstrom had an effective sales team comprising of young talents (Heroics) who gave their full time and efforts in maintaining the reputed position of Nordstrom by giving exceptional customer service increasing the brand loyalty amongst customer and sales/square foot.
Decentralized system in the company enabled regional store manager to make their own decisions to enhance customer service …show more content…

The competitive edge of Nordstrom being successful was based on its superior customer service. This service included writing thank you notes to customers or retrieving desired items from other departments and many other exceptional things but the hours spent to maintain this service was not a part of salespeople´s evaluation i.e. SPH.
The SPH ratio discouraged spending time on delivering customer service because every hour spent on that means losing time to achieve sales. For example, a sales clerk who is very concerned with serving customer and thus helps to retain customers will come off badly in term of his SPH ratio compared to a colleague who is only focusing on sales and doing badly on customer service. There are high chances of Customer Dissatisfaction also if the SPH system continues and soon the Competitive advantage of Nordstrom of exceptional customer service can …show more content…

The Gap occurred because of the inconsistencies between HR strategy and HR systems.

Hard vs soft elements
I believe that the Nordstrom Hard elements like strategy, structure and systems were strong but Nordstrom soft element like people, shared values, style of management and skills were not aligned to company hard elements. There was an imbalance between these two elements and in leadership class we have studied that a business can be successful if there is a balance between hard and soft elements.

Conclusion:
The company was using SPH as a tool to force employees to work off the clock but not to record them in SPH and at the same time was saving money by manipulating employee behaviors by not rewarding them for their actual efforts and time. The SPH and its complaints by employee was not taken seriously by Management and thus it resulted into loss of company financials and reputation.
Company was unable to align its employee KBF with Company KSF.
I believe every compensation system should be such that it should reward the employee fairly based on productivity and efficiency of

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