Mandeep Singh

I am currently working as a Customer Trading Manager at Sainsburys. My role is to make sure that I am a great role mole to my colleagues to deliver great customer service. I coach, motivate and guide all of my colleagues to work together as a productive team for example, communicating on plans for the store and how well we are doing as a store and finding ways to improve. I will also organise colleagues to do tasks across the store. Dealing with customer complaints and figure out how we can improve as a store. Most importantly have honest feedback with the colleagues about ways of working better and giving great customer service. When a colleague is doing well, I would celebrate success with colleagues.

I have worked at Tesco Broughton Road. I have worked with Tesco for over 8 years. I have learnt a lot of thing in my time at Tesco. For example when I first started in Tesco I was just a general assistant as I was working on the pizza counter. In my first year at the counters I manage to learn all counters. Eventually I managed to get signed off in all the available counters. At the time Tesco had Five counters: daily, hot daily, meat, fish and pizza counter. Once I was signed off on all the counters I was able to train all the colleagues and the even the new starts. My manager was very supportive as I would get given leadership e learning to do over the set time period so I can develop on my leadership skills.

There was a time when a team support job was available in store he and I spoke to my manager that I was interested in. I did take the opportunity and went for the job. I knew it would be hard as I was very young at the time and did not have enough experience in leading a team . It was hard work learning checkouts as i had never done it before. My checkouts manager and the checkout team leaders were very helpful in teaching me how to run checkouts. In my time in checkouts I learnt how to deal with difficult situations and customers. I also learnt how to make schedules for the whole department of 20/30 people. My daily job routine would be making sure that everyone gets there breaks and answering any schedule related questions. I would also have to try and cover any sick calls for the day to make it easier for the team leader who was in after me. As well as that I would answer any product related questions from customers. For example if the label product price on the shelf is wrong I would need to assistive customer over the customer services to help them with that make sure that customer leaves the store happy.

Working during the pandemic was very stressful as my manager and most of the team leaders went off due to COVID Protocol. In that time period, I stepped forward and took In charge of the department. I would make sure that we had enough colleagues to sit on the checkout to serve the customers and making sure that they had everything available to them as such as hand sanitizer and wipes. I would make sure that everything customers needed was available to them before the entered the store to make it safe for them and my colleagues. I would give out sweets and water break to all colleagues as I know how stressful it was serving hundreds of customers during the panic buying period.

I was then offered a Shift Leaders job at one of the biggest shops in Edinburgh. I worked at Hermiston Gait for almost 2 years. In these 2 years I learnt how to run a supermarket. I would look after the store and make sure we delivered customer needs. I would lead twilight grocery team to ensure we worked all delivery and maintained a good shop standards.

I worked at Primark for work experience in the summer for two weeks and learnt a great deal about retail work. Towards the end of my work experience I was offered a position to work for Primark. This was crucial to me as I learnt a considerable measures at Primark. The employee I worked with was very supportive as they taught me more about the retail business industry and how to behave around and towards customers and also how to cooperate with customers to give them the best shopping experience possible.