Target
Target Corporation is one of the largest retailing companies in the US after Walmart. The company was founded in 1902 and serves both American domestic markets and global markets with various assortments of merchandise and food items. Target Corporation operates in three lines, which include the USA Retail, the USA Target Credit Card, and Canadian Credit Retail. The Credit Card segment uses the company’s credit cards to offer credit sales to potential and qualified customers. The company does this in most cases through the use of Target Visa or through the use of any other Prescribed Target Credit Card. In the past, the company has faced various challenges as far as the use of Target Credit Cards and Target Visas is concerned.
Customers and other categories of stakeholders raised complain on the services offered through the use of Cards by the company. For example, the report released on December 19th 2013 stated an emergence of fraudulent in the operations of the company. It was speculated that the Target Company was experiencing unauthorized access to its payment card data. This discovery preempted that some data from the payment cards were being replaced with unknown information from unidentified sources. This situation created anomalies in the performance of Target stores and due to prompted stress and anxiety about the safety of services offered through the use of payment cards, consumers, employees, and potential investors felt it would be wise to conduct transactions on cash basis other than using the company’s credit cards.
Still on the issues of fraudulent, regular guests complained of failures in the system, which at times would result in inefficient, untimely, and incredible services. The concern by customers on the use of Target Credit Cards was that, since the service is linked directly to banks, the system failure would result in huge drawings from their bank statements. In other words, customers were losing trust on the credibility of the card services offered by the company and feared incurring huge losses. The only interesting part is that the failures were being observed within USA Target Credit Retails while the Credit Retails in Canada had no issues of fraudulent or system failures. This meant that the company was facing managerial issues and certain individuals had interest on the company’s technological advancement.
While responding to the attached issues, the company’s management had to make clarifications on the operations of the company with an objective of restoring trust among consumers and improving employees’ performance. The company through its operation manager had to make it clear that the observed unauthorized access to Target Cards was particular to the US stores while the Canadian stores remained intact and unaffected. Similarly, the levels of frauds were significantly lower than the actual levels as was being postulated by some of the customers. In addition, the manager stated that disclosing card PIN number to unauthorized user would possibly lead to fraudulent but where there are no indications of PIN number being compromised, it becomes impossible for someone to use another person’s card for various transactions.
In order to make the company guests and customers feel secured, the Target Company gave extra assurance and became inclined towards offering free, effective, and close credit monitoring for the affected customers. The company offered to reduce instances of card fraud by engaging customers in the monitoring process through proper supervision of cash inflows and cash outflows.