The Hamilton Spectator
By Lisa Grace Marr
At the first stop on a “mystery shopping” tour where we’re keeping tabs on customer service, we almost have to beg for attention.
We’re in a Burlington store shopping for a digital camera. The sales person seems to know a lot about digital cameras, but never asks what we want to use it for. He gives us a spin on Hewlett Packard cameras and leaves when we fall silent.
“He just committed the cardinal sin of retail sales,” said my companion, Andrij Brygidyr.
“He didn’t close the sale.” Brygidyr and I are posing as customers on a mystery shopping exercise.
Brygidyr is a University of Toronto business professor and president of A&A Merchandising, a merchandising and marketing firm which uses mystery shoppers as a research techniques.
Mystery shopping is a growing industry where hired “shoppers” pretending to be customers check out merchandising, customer service, employee integrity and product quality. It’s worth about $20 million in Canada, according to the Mystery Shopping Providers Association, and about $500 million in the U.S.
There are mystery shopping companies in Hamilton, and mystery shoppers in local stores. “If the program is well-designed, a mystery shopper will measure against the company’s expectations, not against the customer’s expectations,” said Tracey Conners, senior vice-president of the mystery shopping division of the Corporate Research Group (CRG), a national market research firm based in Nepean.
In other words, whether I’m satisfied as a customer really doesn’t matter. What does matter is whether or not the sales associate behaves in the way he or she was trained. CRG has 25,000 mystery shoppers on staff across the country.
Mystery shopping is mostly linked to the retail industry, but it is also used in travel and tourism, hospitals, government services, banks and housing. For Canada’s $30-billion dollar retail industry, meeting company objectives, especially around customer service, is critical to success.
“(Retailers) know customer service is the only differentiator,” said Brygidyr. “Why would you go to Staples or Office Depot? All you have is service and price.”
Back on the tour, we head to an independent camera store where we think they might have better service. This time, the salesman asks us if we want help, but then only pushes Fuji cameras. Even when Brygidyr asks some leading questions about printers and accessories, we get only basic information. He clearly knows a lot about cameras but when we fall silent at the end of our conversation, he doesn’t try to close the sale.
Brygidyr wonders if suppliers have made recent visits to the two stores we’ve visited. “Fuji has been there,” he said, gesturing at the independent store. “Either the store got a large shipment so their profit margins are higher or the sales people are being offered incentives.”
Brygidyr engineers such strategies. Three quarters of A&A’s clients are suppliers or manufacturers of goods such as cameras. They use a company like A&A to train sales associates about a product, then A&A hires a mystery shopper to enter the store to see how the product is being pitched.
“That’s where the fight is. It’s in the store. Sixty per cent of purchase decisions are made at the point of sale,” he said.
At the last store, the store manager asks great questions about why we want a digital camera and then launches into an overview of what’s available and what would suit us. The closest he comes to closing the deal is to mention the store’s return policy.
“You can try it and see if you like it,” he said.
By the end of the day, no one has tried to close a sale, and that’s a no-no.
