Resume Parts & Pieces, Work Experience: Jarden Consumer Solutions

Jarden Consumer Solutions, or, as I commonly knew them when I worked there, Tilia and VillaWare, was my first employer in California. Technically the temp agency that hired me to work at Tilia was my first employer in California, but Tilia was my first job with them.

I was first hired with Tilia to work with the retail services representatives to answer their phones for them. There were between seven and nine representatives at that time, and the bulk of the phone calls were from retailers wanting to order Tilia (FoodSaver) or VillaWare products, or they wanted to speak with their representative in sales or operations. In other words, when I started in September of 2004 I was a receptionist, and by January of the following year I had been offered a job with the company to be a retail services representative myself, specializing in RMAs and certain retailers, such as Kohl's. About one month after I was hired at Tilia the entire company was given word that the operation was moving to Neosho, Missouri for shipping and warehousing, and to Hattiesburg, Mississippi for administrative. We would be assisting in the transition not only in our approach to customer contact, but in the systems that we used to process orders and ship supplies, going from an SAP system to an AS400 system. Most, if not all of us, would be staying through the transition that would be scheduled for completion in August of 2005.

The skills that I honed with Jarden were minimal compared with my past jobs prior to that point, but I did significantly branch out in one specific area: satisfying customers at a corporate level as opposed to a retail situation. Many of the customer service aspects of retail carry over to a business-to-business type of situation, but some do not--my biggest challenge was in taking care of customers who had multiple representatives for their corporations. Mastering this challenge was a simple process of determining the customer's needs AND the representative's needs so that I could equal the two out, not unlike my developed focus of strengthening a business through customer service while improving employee retention. The contacts that I made within our customer base often became friends in the sense that I could offer them solutions to make their ordering process progress more smoothly or that they would have to maintain it less often by trusting me with the replenishment details. And, while I've mentioned that it was a challenging skill to master, it was a pure joy to discover that next level of customer service in myself and my performance.

In the next post, I'll talk about how my last job in Missouri with Alltel Communications helped prepare me for the jobs I was to enter in California.

Resume Parts & Pieces, Work Experience: Furitechnics

When I first started with Furitechnics (Furi, for short) in the fall of 2005, I was coming in with the experience of having worked in kitchen supply manufacturing and a long line of customer service positions. Furi was based out of Australia, with manufacturing centers in China, and was just starting to branch out in the United States with manufacturing chef's knives, and after Rachel Ray mentioned how much she loved their knives, sales spiked and Rachel got her own line of Furis, replete with orange handles.

The company had a grand total of eight employees at the time that I was there, and my job was to take care of orders, returns, and communication with customers--"customers" being retailers. Many of the retailers that I worked with were on-line and selling on Amazon or eBay, but I also worked with Williams Sonoma, Bed Bath and Beyond, and Kohl's. Most of my work was done via e-mail or by phone, but the back-end of my work involved processing returns from the retailers, sorting out repairs and resells at discount, and sending defective items back to the manufacturer in China. This process involved working closely with the co-owners of the company to make sure that all proper precautions were being taken to assure that a return was a genuine return and not of an overstock nature.

In the second half of that year Furi promoted me to a sales analytical position, and from there I took on not only the customer management but the sales application of the business. I married the best of operations and sales together to create a more targeted audience for our sales team. By the end of my tenure, with goals in place and many of the customers set on quotas that were met, the company decided to streamline operations and sales even more and moved the customer service and analytical duties to the accounting side of the business. At that point I was considered outsourced, and moved on to looking into opportunities with Grainger.

How did my tenure with Furi help to shape my introduction to Grainger? For starters, much of my knowledge with Furi was in international shipment control and sales, and my first interview with Grainger was for an export coordinator position. Possessing the experience of working with businesses, however (as opposed to working directly with a retail customer), also helped me with getting my foot in the door at Grainger. Working in wholesale or business to business takes a certain amount of finesse over transactional, typical retail--you are often working with business owners, accounts payable representatives, and purchasing agents instead of a customer with less corporate potential. I found my experience at Furi invaluable for this reason, but I was hoping for more growth in balancing the customer experience with the employee experience by going to Grainger.

My contacts at Furi were made aware of me, as I mentioned earlier, by my previous experience in manufacturing of kitchen supply materials, and that experience came from Tilia and VillaWare, two joined companies that worked out of an office in the South of Market (SoMA) district of San Francisco. In my next post I'll explore how I obtained that position and how it contributed to my goals of customer service and employee retention balance.