How to implement a mystery shopping program
What are the dos and don'ts when setting up a mystery shopping program? Discover the 7 essential elements of a successful mystery shopping program.
What are the dos and don'ts when setting up a mystery shopping program?
The history and importance of mystery shopping
Mystery shopping, in its various forms, is not new: it began over 50 years ago with the growing importance placed on customer service. Mystery shopping has since become a respected method for verifying sales skills, customer service levels, and product quality. It is also a useful way to keep an eye on the competition and ensure compliance with legal regulations.
In today's highly commoditized market—where the historical differentiators of price, product quality, and delivery are entry-level requirements—customer service is often the key to success or failure. Being able to evaluate direct customer experiences by seeing or hearing oneself from the customers' perspective can help organizations develop more effective customer management strategies.
The benefits of a well-designed program
A well-designed and executed mystery shopping program provides you with information that a member of the company could never gather. It highlights what your business is to your customers in an unfiltered and, above all, measurable way, with the ultimate goal of adjusting to correct any potential wrongs that appeared during the evaluation.
When designed correctly, mystery shopping programs:
- Increase sales and profitability through more engaged customers;
- Provide a practical way to improve and optimize services;
- Motivate employees to better represent the brand and create a pleasant atmosphere for customers;
- Generate excitement among customers by meeting and then exceeding their expectations.
Mystery shopping or mystery guest services are all about valuable customer feedback. Surveys allow you to give your company a global picture of customer satisfaction, but mystery shopping goes further by providing impartial information on the "feel" of your business at a deeper level.
Channels covered by mystery shopping
Mystery shopping can be carried out via all direct communication channels—face-to-face, web, email, mail, and telephone—and this research technique is increasingly used by call centers, inbound sales teams, and technical support so they can verify that the actual customer experience is in line with the intended experience.
However, one of the problems highlighted by the implementation of a mystery shopping program is that an organization may not have exactly defined what the customer experience should be. If you try to measure it, you need to know what it should be. In other words, do not start your mystery shopping campaigns until you have defined what you consider to be the customer experience.
Anticipating problems and testing processes
By checking customer service levels, mystery shopping allows companies to anticipate potential problems before those problems are recognized by customers. Companies are also able to "field test" new processes as they are rolled out to customers, test and measure third-party performance against goals, Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and finally, use mystery shopping to evaluate staff performance.
After all, being able to evaluate one's service from an objective perspective is essential if a company wants to remain competitive, and mystery shopping allows companies to identify weaknesses, set improvement goals, and isolate training needs.
The 7 elements of a mystery shopping program
The benefits are numerous, but there are a number of points to consider before implementing such a program in your company. A mystery shopping program should include the following elements:
1. A service review via an audit
A service review via an audit to verify that standards are at the highest level, and corresponding checks to ensure that these standards meet customer expectations. This initial step is crucial: it establishes the baseline against which all subsequent evaluations will be compared.
2. A questionnaire for mystery shoppers
A questionnaire intended to be completed by mystery shoppers to evaluate the company's service levels via ratings and comments. The questionnaire must be detailed enough to capture all dimensions of the customer experience, while remaining usable in the field.
3. Carefully designed interaction scenarios
Typical interaction scenarios with customers designed to include complaints or requests. Remember, you must ensure that the most common types of calls are also evaluated, not just problematic ones. Comprehensive coverage of scenarios ensures that the evaluation reflects the reality of everyday life.
4. Reports tailored to your needs
Edit reports. With this in mind, you should determine your reporting needs in advance. What information is essential? For which audiences? In what format? Thinking ahead avoids unusable reports or reports that are drowned in data.
5. External mystery shoppers
Mystery shoppers should never be your own employees. Here is a concrete example of why this is so important: a company owned six points of sale and had identified weaknesses in the quality of their customer handling. They decided that each point of sale should perform a mystery shop on another point of sale, but all the managers knew it was going to happen. As a result, they all made an agreement to ensure that everyone's scores were very good. Objectivity requires independence.
6. Service improvement goals
Service improvement goals must be defined. Without clear goals, the collected data remains numbers without any prospect for action. Goals transform insights into levers for measurable progress.
7. A joint training program
A training program that should be used in conjunction with the mystery shopping campaign. The results of mystery shopping only take their full value if they fuel targeted training actions, allowing teams to close identified gaps and improve their skills.
Conclusion
Quality service can have a lasting impact on your customers' loyalty and satisfaction, as well as on the quality of the customer experience itself. Quality is in the eye of the customer, and these customers expect quality as a given.
A customer experience that embraces true quality is one that recognizes customer requirements from the "outside-in," and a good mystery shopping program is a powerful tool that allows companies to achieve this. The result will be happier and more motivated staff, satisfied customers, and, ultimately, a healthier bottom line.
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