Miscomm

So I got a call from a recruitment agent this afternoon sharing with me a new job opportunity that he thinks I might be suitable for based on my work experience.

During the first 5 minutes of the call, instead of telling me what the job actually is, the agent went on this questioning spree asking me about my current job and what I did previously, and I shared with him that I had been doing Interior Design previously but am currently working as an Interior Stylist, and the reason why I am actively looking for a new job at the moment is because my current role as an Interior Stylist is too sales oriented and I wanted a position that was more creative and design oriented. I think it was made very clear during the first 5 minutes of my conversation with him that I didn't want to do a sales related job at all, and this wasn't something I was telling him out on my own accord, this was information he was getting out of me from his plethora of questions.

And when he finally shares what the position is with me, I was just so fucking annoyed because it's a Sales Position in a shop selling sanitary ware. All the questions he was asking me at the start and all the replies I gave him, they were all just redundant because he didn't even bother to listen to what I was saying.

 

I said I do not want to do sales anymore and am looking for a design position, that should be a sign for you to then get to the point and tell me right away that the position is sales related, it's just all that built up he created and then I am presented with a job opening that is not even remotely close to what I am looking for.

Sales Associate in a Sanity Ware Shop.

Hello! 

I have a diploma in Interior Design.

I have 4.5 years experience as an Interior Designer

I have 1 year experience as an Interior Stylist (on my resume anyways)

How the fuck does all that experience in those design related field make me a suitable candidate for a Sales Associate in a Sanitary Ware shop? Are you fucking dense?

That 10 minutes call I had with the agent could have been a 1 minute call if he had just told me from the beginning what the job was instead of beating around the bush. I am really annoyed because I am genuinely looking for a new job at the moment and this moron gave me so much hope at the start by asking me so many questions about what I was looking for in a job, I genuinely thought the agent was ticking off the check boxes for me about the job, but nope.

I have gotten many calls from recruitment agencies before offering me a chance to interview for a position I am not interested in, but something but this particular call just got me really annoyed because of how dense the agent is. The level of annoyance I felt from this call is probably only second to this other experience I had with another recruitment agency who tricked me into going for an interview that I didn't want to go to.

Since we are on the topic of miscommunication, I also had the pleasure of attending to one customer via Zoom today for an Interior Styling Session. 

So just to quickly introduce what an Interior Styling Session is, it is essentially a service my company provides to customers who want to get furniture pieces from us but do not know where to start, so as the Interior Stylist, my job is to do Space Planning for them using furniture pieces from the brands we carry.

Most clients who understand what our service is about would usually understand why we would want to meet them in person in the Showroom, because we want them to physically try out the furniture so they can decide which one is the most comfortable, and then I can then do the furniture proposal accordingly to their preferred pieces. 

When the marketing team introduced the service via the company's Instagram page, we got about 5 customer leads. I contacted 2 leads and disseminated the rest to my colleagues. Out of the 2 I had, one responded and asked if we could do the meeting via Zoom and when she shared that request with me, I kinda had a feeling that she probably misunderstood what the service was about, but decided to agree to her request anyways and set up a Zoom appointment with her.  

The meeting starts and the first thing I asked the customer is if she knew about our company and what we do and her response was...

"I must have heard of your company, I mean I found you guys, but could I just check how you guys got my contact information?"

... so do you know our company or not? It's a simple Yes or No question,  What's "I must have?" and what's the deal with her not knowing where we got her contact information from? What have you been doing with your own contact information? Scrawl them on the walls of multiple public toilets and hope someone will save that number and contact you?  Should I say I got your number from the public restroom at Changi Village or MacRitchie Reservoir? 

I mean this first part was already a red flag to me because if you are not aware of my company, then you are probably not aware of the brands we carry and the prices of the furniture pieces form those brands. 

 

But I moved on from that and quickly introduced the company to her and told her what the Interior Styling service is about, which is to help her do a space planning for her space with the furniture pieces we carry. She just nods her head, so I requested for her to share her floorplan with me and what she is planning to do with her space.

She sends the floorplan to me via Whatsapp and then starts by telling me she wants to have a space dedicated as her study room, and that she wants to get a height adjustable study table as well as an armchair, I tell her my company doesn't carry height adjustable study tables and she then informs me that she will buy it on her own elsewhere, but that she needs me to help her decide where would be the best place to put that table.

I got a bit iffy when she shared that with me because the whole point of this service is to furnish your space with furniture pieces from our store, not to help you plan your space with furniture pieces you are going to be getting from another store. That's not a very smart move for us, it's like me going to Gong Cha and asking the workers there to recommend what I should get from Mr Coconut.  

After that, she moves on and tells me she also wants to do a glass for somewhere for her study room and that was when I decided to interrupt her and ask her once again again if she knew what our company sells and then repeat what our Interior Styling service is about, that was when it finally click for her and she goes...

"Oh, so you guys don't do carpentry works?" 

She thought she had signed up for a consultation session with an Interior Designers for renovation works. 

I didn't want to waste her time or mine anymore, so I introduce the price point of our furniture and that was enough to scare her off, she then requested to cut short the consultation session and I was more than happy to do that. I had jokingly shared with my colleague that the session probably will only last 30 minutes because the customer might have misunderstood about our service and I was half right, she did misunderstand what our service entails, but the session only lasted maximum 5 minutes. 

After that, I feedbacked to the marketing team that all the leads that we had gotten from their via their Instagram advertisement is garbage, but in a nice way. 

The way the Interior Styling service is being marketed definitely needs a lot more work.

Zero Fulfillment.

Nowadays, whenever there is "training" being delivered by my boss, I always feel extremely unmotivated right after and I am sure this is the opposite effect of what my boss has in mind for his employees when he does all this training, I'm pretty sure he is trying to inspire us and motivate us to do better, but sadly, because of how disconnected he is to how his floor staff operates. whenever I listen to him attempt to train us, I can't help but immediately question how feasible all his tips and tricks are and how much he actually believes them working.

He has given us multiple training over the past almost 1 year I have been with the company and  every other month, he would contradict himself without even realizing it. 

Just a few months back, he was telling us not to approach the customers and give them space to walk the showroom because people need time to familiarize themselves with the space, and only to approach them later and ask them if they require any help. But then fast forward to now, he is telling us to approach the customers the moment they step into the store because we have to guide them to the showroom, and that we should just stick to them like glue, this is also to pressure customers who are not really serious about buying our furniture to quickly exit the store from the sheer discomfort of being shadowed by a salesperson. 

It's very hard for me, or any of my colleague, to take his training seriously when he is constantly flip flopping around the SOPs every other month, sharing with us why his method works. I mean does it work if you find the need to be swapping them every other month and do you actually think any of the sales staff will take the training seriously when we are all very aware of how much contradiction is happening between trainings?  

Unmotivating and extremely useless sales training aside... 

When it comes to restocking furniture pieces for the Warehouse and getting new pieces to display in the Showroom, instead of asking the sales team what is actually selling and what the customers are asking about, he chooses to speak with the Merchandising team to get their opinion and what ends up happening is he will end up just restocking the same few sofas and armchairs we have been getting for the past few months, because based on the sales record, those items are selling, but then he doesn't realize that the only reason those items are selling is because those are the only items that we are showing on the showroom floor. We have customers coming into the store expressing interest in other designs that they have spotted online, but they don't end up getting those because they can't test out the furniture in the store, and the reason why they can't test it out is because my boss isn't ordering those in, and the reason why he isn't ordering those in is because he doesn't ask the sales team for suggestion, almost as if our opinions don't matter to him.

About 2 weeks back, I was preparing a showroom layout proposal for an upcoming collection that the store is planning to bring in, I took into consideration the overall look of the showroom, what colors I thought would look good in the space, what colors we already have that we don't want to repeat, what colors hadn't brought in yet that could inject some fun into the space that would work with our existing pieces and most importantly, what other furniture design the sales team wanted to bring in based on customer feedback as well as what some of the senior staff feel use to sell really well. I was so excited to share all this with the boss because it would be nice to actually show him that I am taking my VM position very seriously and I was hoping that I will be able to make a visible change to the Showroom, and actually move away from the previous VM's vision of the space,  but on the day of the meeting, I had to attend to a customer, so my boss and the merchandising team started the meeting without me and I figured I will just join once I was done with the customer.

Well, when I was done, I went towards where my boss was, expecting him to ask me to join the meeting, but when he didn't,  I thought maybe he thought I was still having a meeting with the customer, so I asked if he needed me to sit in, to which he responded with...

"I would rather you concentrate on serving the walk in customers, it is the weekend, the store is going to be busy and I would prefer all of you to be on the floor serving. you have already briefed the merchandising team so they will present your slides on your behalf. "

... I had only shown to the merchandising team very briefly what my proposal was, a proposal I had spend days doing, how did he think that the short exchange I had with them was sufficient? 

That is how serious my boss takes me as the store's Visual Merchandiser, so little fuck is given about my opinion that he doesn't even bother to let me present my proposal and instead prefers for me to focus on my role as a Sales Associate, a role he is very aware I did not apply for, a role I thought I would slowly gravitate away from after I became the store's VM, and sadly, a role that he will always sees me first and foremost. 

A Sales Associate. 

When I got shared the list of items that my boss had decided to purchase with the merchandising team, I come to find out that pretty much none of the items I had proposed were picked, and instead of getting the items that me and the sales team thinks will work with the space, he goes and get this huge modular sofa from a series that isn't selling well at all. I honestly do not know why he chose that because I am pretty sure the sales from the past year shows very clearly that no one is getting that series. We literally have a sofa in that series in the store that has been there since I joined and barely any customer has asked about it, but for some reason, my boss thinks it is a great idea to buy an even larger one. When I shared this with the sales team, everyone pretty much had the same response... 

"Why?"

... and this is what I mean by him being so fucking disconnected. You make purchasing decisions with the wrong group of people, and when the sales team performs poorly because of your poor decisions, suddenly it's the sales team fault for not performing. 

I so desperately want to quit my job right now because of how undervalued I have been feeling, despite actually doing design proposals for my colleagues as the Interior Stylist, I have been constantly updating layout proposals for the Showroom and making quality of life changes for the team as the store's VM, but my boss still continues to calls me out for not doing my job because I haven't been emailing him my correspondences I have been having with customers, customers I do not have because I am busy helping my colleagues with their customers design proposal.  

No matter how well I do my job as an Interior Stylist or the VM, I will never be performing as long as I am not doing well as a Sales Associate. My boss keeps telling me he didn't hire me just to do sales, he also hired me to do Interior Styling, but when I am doing Interior Styling work, he calls me out for being lazy because it's not my customer but my colleague's customer.

At the end of the day, I am doing Interior Styling, it's just not in the way my boss had originally intend, but it is still Interior Styling, but because he is so fucking narrow minded, he doesn't register me helping my colleagues as me doing my part as an Interior Stylist. I have to be doing my role as an Interior Stylist according to his perception for it to be considered me doing my work.

This narrow mindedness is also what makes the sales team have so little respect for him as a boss, the amount of shit we talk about him behind is back is honestly extremely toxic, but at the same time, it's inevitable because he is so frustratingly rigid, I mean he is getting his personal assistant to give us sales training on the days he isn't available, his own PA, who has no experience doing sales at all, giving the sales team sales training.   

Let that ridiculously unqualification of ridiculousness fucking sink in. 

Your PA have no sales experience, but you are making her give the sales team, who consist of individuals who have a combined sales experience of at least 20 years,  lessons on how to do be a better sales person. 

That's like me getting driving lessons from someone who doesn't have a driving license, but has taken a few basic theory lesson.

That's like me learning how to bake from someone who has experience eating Begawan Solo cakes.

That's like me getting a heart transplant surgery from someone who has watched every season of Grey's Anatomy. 

The pay is not good for the amount of work I am expected to do, I mean I was suppose to get a pay increment since March but that conversation has not happened yet because my boss kept postponing our KPI. I am very sure if he wanted to, my boss can make time for us, but the only reason he isn't is because he simply doesn't want to discuss our inevitable pay increment.

And instead of increasing the pay of his existing pool of floor staff, he goes and hires 3 new people for the team. 

1 Sales Supervisor and 2 Interior Stylist

The 2 Interior Stylist are now facing the same issues I faced when I first joined, which is an identity crisis. They came in fully expecting to do design related work, but then are suddenly required to do sales. no where in the new job description that had been put up did it mention sales.

You say the business is performing poorly, well, here is one very obvious reason why, you are hiring the wrong group of people! 

You want people to do Sales, hire people to do Sales.

You want people to do Design, hire people to do Design.

Don't put a job ad looking for a Designer, but then expect that designer to be able to do Sales as well. The main reason why I had originally applied for this role was because I thought I wouldn't have to do Sales, the 2 new Stylist who joined recently also came into the role becoming completely unaware that they had to do Sales and they remained unaware for almost a while until they started to realize that they were not doing more sales than design related work.

To be honest, I am very aware of the reason why my company doesn't want to put Sales in the job description, it's because they are not offering the main benefit of a sales roles, which is commission. Any experienced sales person would immediately lose interest when they realize there is no commission, so what my company does is they put the position as "Interior Stylist" to attract the more design centric individuals and when then make them do sales under the pretense that..

"You are not just doing sales, you are more than that, your job is to help customers create their dream home."

 

...it is a load of bullshit.

I have been doing just proposals for my colleagues for the past month, and I have been CC-ing my boss when I email those proposals to my colleagues because his micromanaging ass dictates that we CC-ing him in everything. 

Then during yesterday's meeting, he singled me and one of my colleague out for a lack of emails with our clients. My colleague has honestly been a bit lazy lately because she is getting ready to go for her maternity leave, but I have been doing my job as a stylist by sending him the proposals I have been doing for my colleagues and that doesn't get brought up, instead he is focusing on me not having any clients of my own. 

So yeah,  really really hating my job right now because of my boss , desperately hoping a new job opportunity will come along soon so I can actually throw in my 1 month notice for real this time. The only reason I am staying is because I can't let go of the monthly pay check. but the temptation to go back to doing Interior Design, despite the full commission salary, is real.

I am honestly wondering if I have to be stuck in this company until the end of the year because I am just feeling really dejected and depressed as the months go by, especially with how my boss has really ramped up on his micromanaging.

Entitled and Stupid.

I have no idea why, but lately, I have been getting more and more unpleasant experience at work. Today, I had a new issue to deal with and it came in the form of one of my PRC customer.

PRC Customers in general just don't have a lot of EQ, this particular customer of mine isn't a nasty individual, but there is just something about her that makes me feel like I am talking to a wall sometimes, it's like she is hearing what I am saying, but never really listening. which I would also attribute to the fact that my Mandarin is horrible and it's probably a struggle for her to listen.

So on the day she got a Dining Table from me, I told her that if she needed to change her delivery date, she has to tell me at least a week in advance and she just went "Will do, will do" in Mandarin, and then 4 days ago, when she came back to the store to window shop, I reminded her once again that her delivery was going to happen this coming Saturday and she just went "Yup, okay" in Mandarin. 

Speaking of her last visit, she had actually messaged me asking me if I was going to be around that day, I told her I will be in the store until 7pm, she comes to the store at 6.30pm , 30 minutes before I was scheduled to knock off from work, and then after she arrives, she was just completely unaware of how inconvenient her timing was for me because after briefly walking her around the Showroom, she plops down on one of our armchair and tells me her friends are coming, that she wants to get their opinion about this particular sofa she was interested to get, and then just waits there for a good 20 minutes. By the time her friends came, it was already time for me to knock off from work, but because of how oblivious she is, she just didn't care and expected me to follow her around, which I did and I ended up OT-ing for an hour. She also didn't end up getting anything, she did reserve a Sofa though, which she didn't end up getting as well, so it ended up becoming a waste of everybody's time, and when she left the store that day, she didn't even say goodbye, none of her friends did, even though we had been talking for an hour, an hour past my working hours no less, they just walked out of the store busy talking to each other even though I was walking them out. I wouldn't be surprised if she doesn't even know my name. 

Her coming to see me at 6.30pm even after I tell her I will end work at 7pm just shows how insensitive she is, if a local customer came at 6.30pm and I told them I will end work at 7pm, more often than not, they will feel very bad and make sure to leave before 7pm so I can knock off on time, but Ms PRC being the PRC that she is didn't give a shit and her friends aren't any better, just 3 women talking really loudly in Mandarin about the comfort level of each sofa.

Anyways, her delivery for her dining table is scheduled for tomorrow, so I decided to send her a reminder this morning because I figured she probably doesn't remember, even though I had already told her about it during her last visit, to me, she just comes across as someone who is very blur, like if she was my colleague, (she actually look like one of my ex-colleague from ID4, so my initial impression of her wasn't great already) she wouldn't be someone I would find reliable, someone who is very stupid, but it's the kind of stupid that her family and friends find endearing.

She doesn't respond to my message until many hours later at around 4.30pm, and it just read...

"Sorry, my condo doesn't allow weekend deliveries, let's just get the table delivered on Monday instead!"

...  I had already told her that if she wanted to amend the delivery dates, she had to tell me at least a week in advance, now she is just telling me to move the delilvery date to Monday so nonchalantly, so I told her I can only schedule her delivery 2 weeks from now, to which she messages me back...

"That's not possible, I am moving into my new house on Monday, how am I suppose to have my meals without a dining table? Think of a way and have the table delivered by Monday! Thanks."

... and suddenly, that stupidity just wasn't all that endearing anymore. This whole thing could have been avoided if she had double checked with her condo about the weekend delivery restriction, she had a whole fucking month to do it, but only informs me about it the day before the scheduled delivery, and she didn't even think to bring this up on her own, she only brought it up after I reminded her about the delivery. That's the level of obliviousness I am dealing with here.

The entitlement she was displaying is also un-fucking-believable, there is no room for negotiation at all, she created the problem on her own, doesn't take responsibility for it and then expects me to resolve it for her. 

Luckily for this stupid woman, the existing deliveries on Monday are fairly straightforward, so my delivery guys are able to plot her delivery in, I have shared the good news with her but she didn't even bother to acknowledge the text.

I do hope she doesn't actually text me anymore and that the delivery on Monday will go smoothly. Just please have everything go smoothly so I can have one less shit to deal with.