Creating an experience for customers

THINK of good service and you imagine staff who smile and greet customers at the entrance of the shop. Customers take their time to browse, and once they are ready to buy, the staff process their orders and say thank you as they leave.

A recent survey showed Singapore’s standards lag those of neighbouring countries. The score on the latest Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore was 67.8 out of 100 points in 2008, down from 68.7 in 2007. This has prompted the government to pump $100 million more into the second phase of the Go the Extra Mile for Service campaign, launched in 2005.

The gap in customer service

What are the reasons for Singapore’s relatively poor performance amid a national drive to invest in frontline training and skills upgrading?

One perspective is the high attrition rate in the service industry, causing a lapse in delivery each time someone resigns. The benefit of training is short-lived as the root problem of staff retention erases the opportunity to create a consistent service standard.

As such, employers resort to hiring foreign labour to compensate for the lack of local manpower, and this approach adds on another layer of complexity, with different culture and language. Lack of awareness of cultural and contextual differences may cause communication breakdown.

Another aspect is that Singapore has had an influx of foreigners over the past three years. Service staff unfamiliar with different nationalities may find it a chore to have to explain or assure a green card customer about an issue that is the norm.

An isolated approach to customer service devalues the role of the service staff. For many SMEs, customer service may be perceived as an operational process to complete a transaction. The lack of a strategic approach means that customer care is the responsibility of the service staff, who are at the bottom of the food chain. Customer service becomes a transaction, not an experience.

A good lesson from business-to- business (B2B) companies is the practice of key account management. As customer intimacy is an enduring competitive differentiation, corporations define the rules of pro- active engagement with customers and spell out standards relative to the different categories of customers they have.

An intentional approach to customer engagement, once defined for different customer types, enables the sales force to nurture and develop the account, allocating and optimising resources. Similarly, in the retail sector, service strategy must begin with the customer, not the product or service you are offering. The customer service strategy for retailers needs to be based on engagement so customers can experience dialogue with staff.

Unfortunately, many staff are guilty of one-way communication and fail to engage customers in a meaningful way, often viewing them as troublesome or even difficult.

What can you do to build a sustainable service experience amid rising customer demands?

Start with the customer’s journey. And contrary to popular belief, the best time to develop your service strategy is when you are small and nimble.

So if you are a small SME in the retail sector, here are some valuable tips to kick-start your service strategy:

Develop your company’s value proposition and resonate that with the customer experience. What can you deliver during the service experience to create memorable touch points? Explain to staff how the right customer service approach can create a competitive edge for your store.

Prioritise your customer care initiative alongside your business initiatives. Demonstrate to your staff how strategic the customer experience is, and define how they can make or break the customer relationship permanently with just one wrong move.

Focus on customers’ profiles and buying behaviour, as this will allow you to prepare for special quirks or exceptional situations. By being prepared, you anticipate the customer’s actions and deliver a service that is seamless for the customer and easier for the staff.

Develop a measurement process to keep your staff on their toes. Mystery shopping campaigns, when designed and customised to address the expectations of customers, help you to identify service lapses before a customer sends a complaint letter.

Develop a coaching culture in your organisation. For retailers with a network of branches, train your branch managers to become coaches and hold daily briefings where services issues can be tabled and corrected on the spot.

Reward your staff for achieving positive service experiences with your customers. A realistic measure would be to have a compliment to complaint ratio per X number of transactions to moderate the score.

Finally, beyond training and skills upgrading, develop an articulate service team that can engage customers by building rapport and maintaining tact and diplomacy when handling objections. The customer experience is not a series of events but a two-way dialogue to ensure the customer’s needs are met.

Success stories

Several market leaders have demonstrated how the customer service experience can create a competitive edge.

SingTel Hello shops go the extra mile to create world class multimedia experiences with their award winning retail concept stores. Integrating the new ambience, all staff are put through rigorous training to ensure customers enjoy both the new retail experience and high standard of service engagement.

Miele, a market leader in household appliances, never forgets to focus on the customer’s lifestyle needs. It demonstrates a professional yet passionate belief in its offerings. Customers coming out of the showroom are mesmerised not by the product but by how it can enhance their lifestyle.

Wellness company Beyond Beauty is an up-and-coming brand in Singapore. Realising how important it is to create a consistent customer experience at any of its spa salons, it invested in ISO certification to ensure it maintains the highest standards of personalised services. Retailers should not find it daunting to start a customer service strategy.

Creating memorable service experiences is the ultimate competitive edge that is priceless to any store. Once you begin with the first step, the rest becomes intuitive and obvious to those focused on the customer’s journey.

By Regina Chua – principal consultant and founder of Discipline Dynamics
article first published in The Business Times.

Clandestine Tools of Mystery Shopping

These days, mystery shopping is being increasingly used by most brand conscious companies. Mystery shopping also referred to as Secret Shopping is opted for to ensure the highest standards of customer service. It also helps the company do a reality check on whether the brand communication of their products is in sync with the pre-decided vision and corporate strategy of the company or not.

This technique implies the use of an undercover agent who visits the retail premises or certain other customer interface areas of a company in the guise of a prospective buyer for a particular product or service. There, he/she fills up a questionnaire or a response sheet giving out general estimations and remarks. These reports are, thereafter handed over to the quality assurance departments who analyze them further to determine the requirements of retraining, rehiring, or motivational sessions to improve upon the existing levels of customer satisfaction.

Which All Are the Potential Grounds for Undisclosed Shopping?

Each and every service industry that has customer service at its core like retail sales or tele-marketing benefit from secret shopping. Experts believe that a mere announcement of secret shoppers’ usage enhances both sales interaction and productivity.

This is why the management needs to deal with the Mystery Shopping reports very carefully. The recorded facts or conversation needs to be shared very sensitively with the team members. The latter may benefit from these reports and their key findings only if they are taken into confidence right from the very beginning of the analysis process. This would rule out all the pessimistic thoughts in their minds and they would consider this process to be an advanced tool of quality assurance rather than an enterprise against them. They would participate in it willingly considering this shopping to be beneficial for the entire company and teams as a whole.

Why Undercover Agents Are Needed?

Irrespective of the method, one can never determine real employee behavior putting an insider to adjudge it. Human psychology requires everyone to be at their best after knowing that they are under behavioral surveillance.

Moreover, internal people are observed more often than not, having developed blind spots to the slipups and weak areas of their company. As a contrast, research professionals posing to be mystery shoppers would not only answer the questions of the report, but also would proffer unbiased opinions along with open ended feedback as well.

Helps Study Competitive Trends

Another major advantage of this shopping method is that it helps the service professionals study the competitive trends and behavior very closely. This is because undercover agents are treated as neutral observers. They are thus provided with all the information that a potential buyer would get. The employees of a particular company whereas, would never be able to get this information from a competitive brand for they would be easily identified.

Business Advantages

Mystery shopping is a process that may greatly help every business. It can open up a host of opportunities for a business house by -

• Helping them identify customer service issues,
• Determining gaps affecting customer relations,
• Suggesting interventions like training and motivation,
• Enhancing brand loyalty in customers,
• Creating walking brands who would bring home world of mouth publicity,
• Improving the sale of the product/service, and so on.

With quality becoming too negotiable for the consumers, they naturally have started expecting it by default. This naturally gives birth to an ever-increasing demand for strong quality assurance measures and perfect customer service. And the only means of keeping tab in this case is Mystery Shopping.

As published on Rave the Web

A Crucial Lesson About Salesmanship

A friend of mine is a District Manager for Honda. For his job he’s in charge of several dealerships making sure they’re doing the proper marketing and getting everything they need from corporate. I guess you could say he is the liaison between the dealerships and corporate.

Part of his job is to obviously help his dealerships become as successful as possible. So the other day he decided he would go mystery shopping to a Toyota dealership to see how they handled customers, to see their marketing materials and to see their overall sales process. He ended up visiting a total of three dealerships.

He said the first two dealerships were very professional and did a great job (and he was able to get material he could use for his own dealerships). He said the third dealership did a horrible job and he spent three hours there because they had no idea what they were doing.

What This “Bonehead” Manager Did…
Well, my friend’s boss had him write up a formal report about his three visits and what could be implemented for Honda. Along the way, another manager found out about the mystery shopping and this particular manager had a friend that worked for the third dealership which did poorly. So this bonehead other manager called his friend at the Toyota dealership and started “ragging” on him about how his dealership sucked, etc. (Yes, an immature move).

Of course the guy who worked at the poorly performing Toyota dealership told his boss, who in turn left the following message on my friend’s voicemail. It went something like this: “Hi, this is Bob Smith the General Manager at XYZ Toyota. I understand you mystery shopped us the other day. I also heard we did not do to well and I would like to talk to you about your notes. However, I am not pleased at all that you wasted three hours of my salesman’s time. I think that is extremely inappropriate and I expect a call back from you. I will be persistent about this and don’t waste my guys’ time again”.

It was a little longer than that, and my friend let me listen to the actual voicemail. So what’s the big lesson you can learn from this? What huge mistake did the GM who left the message make?

If this GM was a good salesman he would have…
Left a very friendly voicemail and said “hey, I would love to hear your notes so I can improve my dealership” and he would have left it at that. However, he was a terrible salesman because on the second half of the message he was confrontational and said how mad he was about the three hours wasted.

Now why in the world would my friend want to call this guy back and help him? He wouldn’t, because if he called this guy back he knew he would get yelled at. My point is, if you need someone to help you out, or you want them to do you a favor then obviously don’t make it difficult for them to help you or call you back.

You need to think like a salesman and put yourself in other people’s shoes…
For example, let’s say you were working with a seller who all of the sudden stopped returning your phone calls. And one day you call him and say “Mr. seller this is Jason from ABC Realty Group. I’ve been trying to call you for the last week and I think it’s very rude that you don’t have the courtesy to call me back. I would like to buy your house still, so call me”. Now of course this guy is not going to call you.

In short, please remember to keep your emotions in check.
Even though we would love to yell at people (I know I would a lot of the time) you will not get business from them, or buy houses from them if you do.

By the way, I told my friend not to call the GM back because he violated a simple rule of salesmanship and he told me he didn’t ever plan on calling him back. You see, had that GM been smart, my friend would have been more than happy to tell him how he could have improved his business.

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Article courtesy of Bigger Pockets® Blog
Author: Jason Hanson

Mystery Shopping – Mysterious Way To Improve Customer Care

Performance analysis and mystery shopping is crucial for any modern business. It is an important part of improving quality of service and enhancing sales so that the business progresses and rules the market. The company that proves its competence gains maximum number of clients.

The stores and companies try out various ways of improving their customer services. They go out of their ways to find out where the drawback lies. Some managers do it stealthily but the smarter ones hire someone else to do the job. Mystery shopping service is one of the mysterious ways of building the relationship with the customers.

Whenever you decide to hire a mystery shopper service, just make sure that you hire the reputed one. A good company would sit with you to discuss the evaluation sheet so that the results are exactly the way you are looking for. The mission of the mystery shopper after this would be to enter your store or shop and locate the areas of deep concern that had created hindrance in the growth of your store.

Telephone Mystery Shopping

Telephone mystery shopping is another aspect of mystery shopping that ensures that the customers’ calls are attended well and their queries are answered properly to rectify their confusions. The procedure is the same; a mystery caller would call up in the store and gather the valuable information regarding employees’ performance.

Telephone mystery shopping is the most reliable source of gauging the customer services over the phone. If the managers themselves call in the store there are chances that they may get caught or their findings could be biased. Whereas a thorough professional mystery shopper would definitely know the ways to carry out the survey so that the best results are obtained in the end. They take large sample of calls, gage specific aspects, and study data in ten different ways.

Whatever be the type of mystery services provided by the company telephonic or otherwise, it is counted as best if it is flexible, have years of experience, depth and a good background. To compare the services of good companies browse the Internet. You can also get help from web vendors that provide excellent tools so that you can enhance your level of phone services.

Good phone service is the key to customer satisfaction. Picking up the phone and inquiring about the type of products and services offered is the general practice among the customers. To answer these calls appropriately you need skilled and trained customer care professionals in your shops and stores. There are some companies that provide pre-evaluation screening of the employees. It helps to highlight the good and the bad qualities of the employee before recruiting them. It is very helpful for the stores.

There are various companies that have been imparting performance analysis programs in the form of video mystery shopping, training services and telephone mystery shopping. Many UK and overseas businesses including the big and famous showrooms to small retailers, all have benefitted from the these mystery shopping programs, especially the telephonic mystery shopping one. Through these programs they have managed to,

- Get an insight picture of what opinion do their customers hold for their products and services. – Expand their businesses on the basis of higher customer satisfaction. – Learn about the problem areas of their employees and ways to improve them. – Retain more sales associates, as there is increased feeling of satisfaction in them.

Customer satisfaction should be the first priority of any business. One can opt for mystery shopping not only when one has started out but undoubtedly it is needed more to maintain the standards of one’s store.

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Article courtesy of Thoughtful Shoppers
Author: Joseph Then

Recession – is not a time to stop improving the customer service- it is time to continue and be ahead of the competition!

Overview of the research conducted in Lithuania: “How the companies are changing their customer service management practices due to economical recession?”

SPECT-DIVE (Lithuanian branch of DIVE Group) together with AKA (National Customer Service Association) have conducted a special research at national level in Lithuania in the beginning of this year. It was designed to analyze how different sector companies are changing their customer service management practices due to economical recession. The outcome of the research is that in the long term perspective the customer service quality will decline and companies will loose the input of nearly ten years as they are cutting the costs on main customer service improvement tools such as personnel training, financial motivation and measurement (mostly Mystery Shopping). It proofs, that there is still a big lack of understanding that customer service management represents not only a cost, but an investment leading to competitive advantage and that refusal of systematic approach towards customer service management can result in bigger losses in the future, not only monetary, but also non-monetary like company image, customer satisfaction and loyalty.

1 scheme. What is your customer service improvement strategy for 2009?

2 scheme. What actions will you take while cutting the customer service costs?

Summary of main findings and conclusions of the conducted research:

• Customer service management costs are being drastically cut (67% of companies are cutting, 33% are not cutting)

• In order to cut costs companies are mostly moving from outsource to internal resources and significant personnel redundancies o Comment of author: If companies will be able to sustain same level of professionalism while using internal recourse (which is significantly reduced in quantity as well) – effects after recession is over can be less harmful, but experience shows that internal people can not be professionals in everything – that is exactly why specialized companies are existing in each market

• Mostly companies are cutting costs by refusing (i.e. total stop of using) of main customer service improvement tools like personnel development (training, attending conferences, financial motivation systems) and measurement (mostly Mystery Shopping)

  • Comment of author:
    These named tools are extremely important in order to sustain the systematic customer service management and also are hard to replace with internal recourse professionally

• Companies mainly focus and move to usage of tools that are possible to execute with internal resource and require smaller investment at a time: creation and implementation of SOP (standard of performance), complaint/praise management, internal and non-anonymous audits

  • Comment of author:
    These named tools are needed to use – but used solely without full measurement and personnel development tools, most likely will not guarantee the expected results

• Companies underestimate and do not take advantage to use cheaper but still effective personnel development tools that actually require quite reasonable and affordable investment or are possible to execute with internal recourse, e.g. establishing self-development and self-training systems, individual development (coaching) done by middle level management, online tools (training, testing, etc.)

  • Comment of author:
    These tools usually require motivated and skilled internal recourse people, a bit more internal initiative and patience- but if used correctly can bring sufficient development results and replace classical training and seminars

Main recommendations for companies to focus and think about before they jump into drastic cost cutting in customer service quality management tools:

• If you choose to use internal recourse instead of outsource – you have to be careful and put enough attention to the professionalism of applied tools (use outsourced consulting at least), especially in Mystery Shopping – because if done unprofessionally it can harm more then help; by doing it unprofessionally you risk with all the input of Mystery Shopping program you have achieved so far

• Main goal is to maintain the systematic use of tools – i.e. to maintain the system of steps: measure -> develop -> motivate -> measure… When you need to cut costs – then cut on quantities, try to be more efficient in each step rather then refuse of one step totally

• Focus on quality of the services you still choose to outsource – try to get the value for money

• Be flexible, diversify, try innovative personnel development tools like self-development, online solutions, but do no refuse this important customer service quality management system step totally

• High quality customer service is a way to differentiate and win the competition now, during economical recession, and accomplish even more after it will be over! So continue and be ahead!

article by: Jurgita Adomaityte
courtesy of MysteryShoppingLive.com