John,
Very important: 19 out of 20 times that I am thinking my employees are being dishonest… I am wrong. The problem is something else, most often cash handling or reporting process… i.e. training. (In my opinion, when employees do things wrong the fault is most often mine… i.e. training was not sufficient)
When it does actually occur, in my experience the most common scenario for coupon theft is the driver bringing in coupons that the customer “forgot to mention” on the phone and getting them added to the transaction. Do customers forget to mention coupons? Absolutely they do, so you have to provide for giving the customer service while protecting yourself from the scam you are concerned with all while giving your employee the benefit of the doubt. (As Reagan said “trust but verify”)
In order for the scam to work the employee has to present one price to the customer and be paid for it and only be responsible to the till for a lower price which means they have to be able to change the order after it is rung up or cause it to be changed. If you have a full featured POS system and good employee training and policies a lot of the false coupon thing is solved. Here is why:
A good POS system will easily show you the orders that were changed after they were placed including having coupons added or changed and who changed them. Our POS system is set to require a manager password to add a coupon after the order is first entered. (or to do anything else that changes the price). If you are seeing orders changed in this fashion it is time to ask questions.
This driver/front counter scam really only works on orders that were placed without a coupon or where the coupon is changed to a better one. Nearly all coupons are mentioned at the point the order is placed. With training of staff to ask if the customer has any coupons this rises to nearly 100% making it very tough for a driver to say the customer forgot to mention the coupon. At the counter, for pick-up, a manager has to come put the password in to add the coupon, so the customer would be standing there. This has never been an issue for us.
I ask first about training and then about other potential process issues: “Why are so many orders needing to be changed” “Is there a problem with one of the offers we use or an employee entering orders that is not clear on how to do it?” ALWAYS err on the side of your employees being honest because for the most part they ARE. If you can not narrow down the problem to training or some process issue, figure out who is having to have a lot of coupons entered and ask the managers that made the changes about them. We see a coupon added after the fact a few times a week… as in 2-3 times, in the normal course of business. Since we have a bunch of drivers this means that any one driver might have to bring a coupon back once or twice a month. A driver that has “forgotten” coupons at check-out every shift is suspicious… but only if your systems are good enough that it does not legitimately occur more often.
- Train order taker employees to get the orders in the system with the coupons to begin with.
- Require a password to make changes to orders in the POS once they are entered.
- Track changes to orders using your POS and investigate in a way that maintains respect for your employees by first assuming that any issue is NOT dishonesty.
- We require that drivers who arrive at the delivery and are given a coupon that was not on the order call in for a new total while they are at the door. It is not acceptable to produce coupons at checkout.
- If I am in serious doubt about a coupon being added to the order, I can call the customer and ask something like: “My employee miss-entered the coupon you used last night. For tracking my marketing, could you please remind me what it was?”
The bottom line for me is that while I am sure that I have been taken from time to time for a small amount of money in this way, the productivity of this business model far outweighs this small risk. It is a heck of a lot easier for an employee to take home $10 worth of groceries from the store or even to simply take $10 out of the till than it is to scam coupons on a long term basis. I would not let this risk stop me from using something that works any more than I would mess with having a padlock on my walk-in.
