This document discusses Shelley, a waitress who has worked at Smitty's restaurant for seven years. Smitty's is a large family restaurant chain in Canada. Shelley fits into the organization as a customer service representative, and she stays organized by multitasking. She believes she is successful due to her strong customer service skills and ability to solve problems like addressing complaints. The best parts of her job are making customers happy, while the long hours and variable tips are challenges. Shelley is motivated by money from tips and enjoying interactions with customers. Her strengths include independence, relationship building, and problem solving.
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Table of Contents
Introduction.......................................................................................................................................3
Company Background.........................................................................................................................3
Her and the company .........................................................................................................................3
How she fits into her organization................................................................................................3
Organization...............................................................................................................................4
Why she is successful...................................................................................................................4
Best/Worst things about her job ..................................................................................................5
Motivation..................................................................................................................................5
Strengths and Weaknesses ..........................................................................................................6
Sales and I..........................................................................................................................................7
Would Ienjoy doing this..............................................................................................................7
Lessons.......................................................................................................................................7
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Introduction
I decided to write my professional selling report on a waitress I know who works at
Smitty’s named Shelley. She has worked as a waitress at Smitty’s for seven years now and she
sells a variety of food and beverage products to many different customers. Majority of her sales
are the in store food and beverages customers order such as breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
However she also sells retail products for the company such as Smitty’s pancake mix, coffee
mix, and waffle mix.
Company Background
Smitty’s has over 115 restaurants making it the largest family restaurant chain in Canada. It
operates from coast to coast making it a real national organization. Smitty’s is particularly
popular with travelers, small children, and seniors. Smitty’s always meets their customers’
needs and has been doing so since 1960 when the first Smitty’s was opened in Calgary, Alberta.
Opening day customers lined up and waited two hours at the door and had become an instant
hit.
Her and the company
How she fits into her organization
Shelley is a waitress at Smitty’s. She waits on customers at tables and makes them feel
at home. She is basically the customer service for the organization.
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Organization
Shelley is very good at staying organized in her job. The main way to help keep her
organized is that she can multitask. In order for her to be able to stay organized in such a busy
place she feels like she needs to be able to do four or five things at one time. The way she
multitasks is by waiting on a whole section of tables at once instead of waiting on one table at a
time.
Why she is successful
In her opinion the reason she is successful is because of a few things. One reason she
believes she is successful is because she is a people person. She loves dealing with people,
especially regular customers. She is able to talk and have good conversations with her
customers and they are able to do the same thing back to her. She is really good with her
customers and works to satisfy their needs. Another reason she believes she has been
successful in this job is that she knows how to solve problems. The most common problem she
is very capable of fixing is customer complaints. When a customer is dissatisfied with their
meals she instantly takes them back and gets the cooks to remake what needs to be remade.
However if it is another reason for customer dissatisfaction she deals with it in other ways.
Since there are many ways a customer at a restaurant could become dissatisfied, but the most
common one is food dissatisfaction. So basically with everything summed up, the reason she
thinks she is successful at her job is because she is very good at customer service.
The reason I thought she was very successful in her job is actually very similar to the
answer she gave me as to why she thought she was successful herself. I believe she is successful
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because she is a people person and very honest. Shelley is the type of person who will tell you
truth about how she feels, or what she thinks of the food she serves etc. and I think that is a key
thing in working in sales, being honest. I think the customers love the fact she is honest and
that makes them want her as their waitress. She also is a people person for the reasons stated
in the previous paragraph as well as she very good at making customers feel welcomed in her
restaurant to the point where customers even come in and ask if she is working. Then if she is
they want to be seated in her section.
Best/Worst things about her job
The best part of her job is that she makes others happy. It is a very good feeling when
you can go to work and know that you will be making others happy or that you could even be
making their day better by engaging in happy conversation with customers.
The worst part about Shelley’s job as a waitress is the long hours she works and her tip
variation. She works much longer hours then she would like to work. She ends up having to
work on weekends which she doesn’t like very much because she sometimes misses her son’s
hockey games, but weekends are good for tips. Which is another downside of her job, tips can
be great one night and bad the next. The fluxuation of tips various sometimes quite a bit.
Motivation
There are many things that keep Shelley going at work. One of the things that helps
keep her going is the money. When you are a waitress you are motivated with money, but not
your salary, you get motivated to work hard to make your customers happy so you can get good
tips. The tips she collects over time amount to a great deal of money. I know a lot of people
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who work in sales with tips and with their tips alone they can pay for food or even rent. Shelley
is very motivated at work to try her best and receive these tips in order to help her salary.
Another thing that motivates her at work is the customers. She loves to make her
customers happy and giving them smiles on their faces everyday makes her happy to go to
work.
She is also motivated by the other employees that work there. What is mean by this is
that all the employees that work at her Smitty’s restaurant is like family. They may not all get
along or see eye to eye, but when it gets down to the skin of everything the people in that
restaurant will always be there for each other to help each other out. For example if an
employee is have a personal issue say with a significant other, death, pregnancy, money, etc.
then another employee will always help them out by doing something like letting them go
home to sort something out and working later for that person. They workers at this restaurant
might not always get along, but they definitely understand each other and the problems that
sometimes occur as they might have previously went through that issue before.
Strengths and Weaknesses
The biggest strengths I feel that Shelley shows at work are that she can work
independently with a goal in mind; she can develop relationships with strangers pretty good
and can recognize, analyze, and fix problems quickly.
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Sales and I
Would I enjoy doing this
I think I would love doing this for a job. Making it clear though that it would be ok for a
job, not a career! There are many reasons I think I would love doing it. One reason I think I
would enjoy doing this for a job is the customer interaction and making customers happy. I
have worked before at McDonalds for three years doing various jobs and one thing I loved
doing was working as a cashier and being able to interact with the customers.
Lessons
The lesson I learned from watching Shelley is that customers like it when you are honest
with them and try to make them happy.
