Customer service backfires and causes employee theft – Atlanta Georgia

Now before I get hung at high noon, let me explain.  I’m not saying to stop customer service or that it is bad.  What I do hope to bring to light is that many things we do in the name of customer service allow employees to take advantage and create internal theft (the retail name for employee theft).

An interesting example of this type of employee theft came to light during a recent employee theft investigation I worked.  Like many companies, mine has a register function to “comp” the price of an item for the sake of customer service.  If we made a mistake we can use this function to alleviate the cost to the customer, but it keeps the item on the receipt for inventory purposes.  Sounds great in theory and as expected the customers love it.  On the down side we had a cashier figure out that she could use that function to take the whole price off of an order.  She then used this to create a little over $1,000 in internal theft of cash over about a month’s time.

The employee theft investigation revealed the following.  What she was doing was ringing up a customer like normal.  If the customer pulled out cash, she would then enter the code for “customer service” and essentially “pay” for the order with that function.  She would still give the total to the customer, take the cash, use a “No Sale” to open the drawer and manually make the change for the customer.  The customer got their full receipt and change and never knew anything odd happened.  What this did was build extra money in the till (which she later pocketed) since she took cash that the register did not know about.  In addition, she would use this function to give free product to her friends who came through the line.

For more information on internal theft, employee theft, or employee theft investigation contact us or call 1.770.426.0547 – Atlanta Georgia