Inside Marketing: Can You Really Measure Customer Experience?

Mystery shopping programs help direct staff training and measure how CUs stack up against competitors

By John Swinburn
Executive Director of MSPA

A senior citizen walked into his Dallas credit union to discuss his soon-to-mature share certificate. Interest rates had dropped, and he was looking for a better way to invest his money.

The teller directed him to a CU member service rep to learn more about his options, noting that possibly an annuity or a conservative mutual fund would better suit his needs.

Unbeknownst to the teller, this senior citizen was more than what met the eye. He was a mystery shopper, evaluating the customer experience. He was taking note of such things as whether the teller introduced him to the MSR, or just pointed and sent him away, and whether the teller restated his inquiry to the consultant, or left him, the valued member, to re-tell his story.

Credit unions are using mystery shoppers right now to monitor and improve everything from customer service and cross-selling techniques to compliance and fair lending practices and how well they measure up to the competition.

Often used as a tool to identify and continually improve customer service, mystery shopping can have a significant impact on every aspect of the customer experience, which ultimately drives the bottom line.

The impact of mystery shopping on credit unions has changed significantly over the years.

“Before, we had to explain mystery shopping,” says Judi Hess, owner of Customer Perspectives(TM) in Hooksett, NH. “Now that the discipline has proven its value to the industry, we need to explain new ideas for maximizing your program.”

Hess explains that an effective mystery shopping program approaches customer service improvement from several angles. The same shopping program can be used to measure and fine-tune training initiatives and highlight specific results with individual employees. Results could also be part of an incentive program on the individual or branch level.

Training and Measurement

$1.6 billion Travis Credit Union in Vacaville, Calif., uses mystery shopping on regularly to monitor all member touch points; including teller shops, loan shops, phone shops and new account shops. Management uses the data to pinpoint specific areas that may need improvement.

Travis CU’s January 2007 mystery shop reports were showing a score of just 62 percent for employees asking questions and listening for cues of how the credit union could better serve members. The CU implemented a training program that taught employees what types of phrases to listen for and what kinds of questions to ask. In a year’s time, the same question received an 82 percent score. During the same time frame, Travis CU had 8,014 direct new members compared to 7,842 in 2006.

“If employees aren’t listening and asking questions, they’re missing opportunities,” said Renee DeSantis, president, Game Film Consultants, a mystery shopping firm in Austin, Texas. “That’s where the value of mystery shopping is very evident. It clearly shows where to focus your training efforts.”

In its shop, $98 million Premier Federal Credit Union in Greensboro, N.C., was looking to improve its cross-selling. It leveraged mystery shopping results to pinpoint specific areas where employees could use additional training.

“Realizing that providing top-level service to members includes offering a variety of products to meet their needs, we began to focus on a ‘needs-based’ selling culture,” says CUES member Lori Thompson, executive vice president of Premier FCU. “Our mystery shopping program was a key factor in being sure employees were on the right track.”

When the mystery shopping program began, Premier FCU employees achieved a 52.8 percent score on closing skills, or asking questions to see where additional products may benefit members. Relying heavily on mystery shopping scores and training provided by its mystery shopping provider (Customer 1st, Greensboro, N.C.), Premier FCU was able to increase its closing score to 95.6 percent in just two years.

Measurements and Morale

Premier FCU also implemented an incentive program for strong shop results by publicly recognizing associates for a job well done. Sometimes associates are rewarded with movie tickets or other small but meaningful giveaways to recognize exceptional evaluations. This step can boost the likelihood of positive results, says Carl Philips, director of Customer-1st.

“It’s about catching them doing it right,” says Phillips. “The old adage, ‘You can’t move what you don’t measure,’ applies here. If associates know a mystery shopping program is in place to measure closing standards, then they will be more likely to meet those standards.”

No matter the type of shop, program or initiative, mystery shopping is an excellent opportunity to boost employee morale.

As Phillips pointed out, the simple fact that employees know they’re being evaluated is often an incentive to do good work. Recognizing employees for a job well done or talking through things that didn’t go so well is a form of hands-on training that gets results.

According to Bob Maietta of Service Evaluation Concepts, a credit union in Massachusetts uses its mystery shopping reports at quarterly meetings with loan officers. Team leaders point out the areas of the mystery shopping program that show weakness, taking out the names of employees and discussing ways to fix the problem. More importantly, they also point out the areas where employees do exceptionally well. That simple task alone helped improve mystery shop scores to the level of the credit union’s service standards.

Frank Aloi of ath Power Consulting in Andover, Mass., says mystery shopping can focus a credit union back on the basics of the industry.

“Credit unions were created to deliver the type of member/customer-focused service that banks want to be known for,” Aloi said. “We’re seeing the trend in the industry that mystery shopping is being used as one of the primary mediums to gather customer experience data. Effective shop programs tell management what really is happening out on the front lines.”

In addition to revealing a credit union’s strengths and weaknesses, mystery shopping can also be used to see how well a credit union is measuring up to its competition. Evaluating the same customer touch points at competitive banks and other credit unions allows significant insight into opportunities to gain new members.

“Using the information for coaching and training truly will create change and improve customer service,” says Brian Caldwell, client services manager for IntelliShop in Perrysburg, Ohio. “It’s a simple equation. Better customer service leads to better member satisfaction which equals a better bottom line.”

Should the crisis bring you down, who will help you rise?

What is the use of Mystery Shopping and how to find a good service provider.

from MysteryShoppingLive.com

In the conditions of the recession many companies reduce budgets assigned for marketing programmes. And this is no wonder. Each business investment must be absolutely balanced, and just bound to hit the gold. In the present situation ordering a Mystery Shopping service can be a solution of this kind. I’ll try to explain why.

Right now, in this period so difficult for all businesses, you will get exact information about the state of affairs in your business from the viewpoint of your customers. What can be more important for you than to understand what you need to offer your potential clients to get them to leave their money at your shop!

The information you will get will not sound like verbose lectures of some guru telling you what should be the right things to do to survive. Neither will it come in the form of sophisticated computations financial analysts would make to show you the situation in other companies. It will be a collection of precise facts about the current state of service in your business (or in the businesses of your closest competitors).

The owners will get data presented in the right form to enable them to take well-balanced and timely decisions.
What can make you stand out now?
What should you focus on in your sales?
What will the clients buy now?
What will make good sales?
Why doesn’t this or that product sell?
And a lot of other information for further decision-making.
Managers in locations will get up-to-date information on how they can quickly and efficiently improve the situation in their shops. You will notice the effect tomorrow!

And the employees will have an additional incentive for proactive work. To put it in simple words, a healthy internal competition spirit will spring up, so your client service will become more concentrated and vivid.

As soon as you realized how useful Mystery Shopping can be in the current situation, the most important thing for you is not to make a mistake while choosing a provider, or, more precisely, the operator that will perform the service of Mystery Shopping for you so that it will be of great use for your future business activity.

It is a proven fact that if a first experience of cooperation with a provider of this service was negative or the result presented to the company’s top management did not match professional standards, the method itself will be deemed a deep disappointment, in spite of the fact that it is not the method but the agency that applied it is to blame. Reports submitted by such agencies will be put on a shelf and forgotten for good, and this will probably be the best thing that can be done about them. I don’t think you would ever like such a scenario at all.

Agencies that sacrifice the quality of their surveys to keep the prices low are not very rare.

As a result, clients get frustrated, as they get something different from what they have planned for or something completely unusable.

So our question is: how can one find a provider that is really professional? What should one necessarily pay attention to when choosing a Mystery Shopping service provider? Here is a list of what I deem to be the key characteristics of a good provider.

Experience in Mystery Shopping. Visit their official website, ask company representatives, and obtain recommendations from their former and actual clients to check this.

• Knowledge of the business area of the client, which is critical for the development of the program of the survey.
• Sufficient geographical coverage. If the scope of your project comprises different regions or countries, check how the coverage of these territories is organized and who the operators are.
• Availability of a sufficient number of mystery shoppers possessing the required specialization in the required regions.
• A specially designed on-line system for data collection and storage that will help you optimize your work and reduce the decision-making time.
• Availability of software and consulting products developed by the agency.
• Availability of experts in all business areas in the agency. The agency’s resources should be sufficient for your project.
• Ability to conduct multi-lingual projects (if your project is going to be international).
• MSPA membership (Mystery Shopping Providers Association).
• Compliance with the effective law, professional and ethical standards of the country.

Important: get acquainted with every member of the team that is presented to you for your project.

In addition to all the aforesaid, I strongly recommend you to check the feedback about the provider before signing a contract with it. Read clients references about provider, articles and other publications. Inspect comments posted on webboards. This will help you avoid the nonpros.

Deciding on the agency, pay attention to the corporate culture and climate in the provider company. Remember that you are looking for a partner with whom you should have good mutual understanding and comfortable long-term relationship.

In conclusion, I’d like to say that no matter what agency you choose for conducting a Mystery Shopping campaign in your company, you should be ready to engage in teamwork. The quality of the results you will get depends on the quality of your formulation of the assignments.

A Tale of 2 Burgers

No doubt you’ve had the experience of traveling along the highway with a rumbling stomach when, all of a sudden, there’s a billboard advertising a juicy, mouthwatering, cheesy hamburger, available within seconds at the fast food joint only one short exit away. Agreeing with your stomach that it sure looks good, you speed up a bit to get there faster, dreaming of splashing it all down with a cold drink.

But as you get ready to devour your meal-in-a-box, reality hits. This burger looks nothing like the picture. In fact, it looks more like a two-year-old slapped it together from pieces of other burgers. You, my friend, have just experienced one of the underlying themes shoppers complain about most often: a disconnect between a brand’s image and the actual customer experience.

If your store’s brand doesn’t match your typical customer’s experience, get on the phone to HR right now. You may not have much time to undo the damage that’s been done. While many customers will put up with an occasional snafu in service or expectations, consistently disconnecting from your brand with bad customer service and substandard products will kill interest in your product. When this happens, your only hope is to prioritize the training and monitoring of your frontline staff to revive public interest and match your service and product with those pretty pictures in your advertisements.

True, customers are fickle. One day they want you to leave them alone to wander the store, and the next day they complain no one is helping them. But the bottom line is, customers who consistently have poor experiences will look for someplace else to shop. And they tell their friends. No retailer wants to suffer bad word-of-mouth. The Internet has made it all too easy to turn the tide of a brand’s popularity with a few truthful, albeit wicked, stories in a very short amount of time.

Retailers must be seriously supportive of ongoing training and coaching for sales associates based upon the principles of excellence in service. This is the only true competitive advantage in an industry where your brand may sink or swim based on public opinion. Companies who seek assistance in developing and maintaining strong training and coaching programs often need a comprehensive mystery shopping program to cultivate the strong frontline staff that drives sales, and provides managers and store owners with the ongoing, meaningful data necessary to maintain and continue to build on those increases in both sales and customer loyalty.

Source: http://www.iccds.com/a-tale-of-two-burgers.html

How Important Customer Care Really Is

As the world now knows, last year a guitarist named Dave Carroll was sitting in a window seat on a United plane at O’Hare airport in Chicago when he looked out and saw baggage handlers hurling guitar cases through the air. He pointed it out to flight attendants; they responded with indifference. When he arrived in Nebraska, he found that his instrument had been smashed. After months of complaining to the airline and getting no response, he wrote and performed a song, “United Breaks Guitars” and posted it on YouTube. It was viewed more than 3 million times in its first 10 days.

Across the world in China, Wang Jianshuo, a famed blogger, posted about a United flight he took to the U.S. A surly flight attendant refused to help an elderly passenger stow his carry-on luggage. The audio on the movie channels didn’t work. The overhead lights turned off and on the entire trip. His return trip was worse: The plane sat on the tarmac for three hours and then was cancelled until the next day because of a fuel leak.

How does a company perform so badly? United Airlines’ ( UAUA – news – people ) stock price was tottering even before the financial crisis. Now that even stellar airlines like Southwest ( LUV – news – people ) suffering, a weak player like United seems doomed to follow in General Motors’ ( GMGMQ.PK – news – people ) and Circuit City’s ( CC – news – people ) footsteps unless it makes major changes. This week, United announced a quarterly profit of $28 million, but that included fuel hedges and other accounting gains, without which it lost $323 million. It also named a new president. The airline’s missteps over the past decade provide a case study of what not to do when running a company.

Here are three key lessons we all can learn from United.

Create Brand Loyalty, Not Simply Satisfaction

It is doubtful that the millions who have watched Carroll’s video or read Wang’s blog will want to fly United anytime soon, unless they have no choice. That is terrible for the airline. It is fighting for every last passenger dollar, and trying to make inroads into the emerging Chinese travel market. Part of the problem is that the company, like many, makes satisfying customers part of its mission statement but fails to go nearly far enough beyond that.

Winning companies like Apple ( AAPL – news – people ) go past mere satisfaction to try to create true brand loyalty. Not only do loyal customers spend more, they are more likely to become brand ambassadors and bring along other customers. When everyone from the mailroom to the chief executive buys into the mantra of creating brand loyalty, the result is increased profits.

Consumers are more price sensitive in this economy, and they are trading down, but it’s still a great time to capture loyalty. People don’t want to waste money on brands that fail to meet their expectations. They’re buying only what they trust, and they’ll return to trusted brands repeatedly.

Instead of watering down its frequent flyer benefits to save costs, United should be taking the exact opposite tack. It should take a page from hotel stalwarts like Starwood ( HOT – news – people ) and Marriott ( MAR – news – people ), which are offering more goodies than before to their most loyal clients. In consumer studies that my organization, China Market Research Group, has conducted, we’ve found that the No. 1 reason people fly United regularly is because they have racked up points in United’s Star Alliance loyalty program. Why would United want to disenfranchise its most loyal customers?

As consumers think harder about where to spend their money, aiming to satisfy them is not enough. Only striving to create true loyalty will work.

Don’t Forget Why You’re Here

Many companies forget their main purpose and become bogged down in just sustaining their operations. United forgets that it’s not only selling a means of transportation that is faster than trains or cars. For vacationers, who make up most passenger traffic, it’s selling dreams and memories. An airline flight is typically the first and last part of a newlywed couple’s honeymoon, or a family’s overseas trip in planning for years. People remember such journeys forever. I fondly recall my own first flight on TWA when I was six years old, to Italy and Greece with my parents. Likewise, my childhood flights on Delta to see my grandmother in Florida. What United fails to get is that it is selling dreams, not just a form of transportation. Few United employees take pride in their jobs, and it shows.

One company that gets it right is Disney ( DIS – news – people ). A trip to Disney World is not simply an outing to an amusement park like Six Flags ( SIX – news – people ) or Universal Studios. It is a time when families can create memories that last a lifetime. Disney trains its employees, from the monorail drivers to the people selling fast food, to be more than just salespeople. They are weavers of dreams. That is one reason families repeatedly return to Disney World, according to research my firm has conducted with visitors from eight different countries.

Unilever got it right with its Axe deodorant. That company understands that it is not selling a way to stop sweat or to smell a little better. It’s selling a way for young men to be more attractive. Axe put together a TV commercial that shows a dorky guy, who happens to use Axe, getting more glances from attractive women than Ben Affleck, the movie star. The spot uses humor to imply that you, too, can be as appealing as the Hollywood star who dated Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Lopez and is married to Jennifer Garner.

To create real customer loyalty, you have to offer more than just functionality. And you have to train everyone in your organization to have the pride to sell an emotional connection, not just tools.

Don’t Forget Employee Morale

United’s workers have been a beleaguered group for years now. They have had their wages, pensions and benefits cut even as the chief executive officer, Glenn F. Tilton, has been paid nearly $20 million dollars over the last five years (despite United’s stock dropping 43% during his tenure). Does that seem fair?

Employee morale has gone into the gutter. Unhappy workers mean terrible customer service‰¥ãas Dave Carroll and Wang Jianshuo and millions of their followers know. The company may have no choice but to lay off workers and reduce benefits in the downturn, but it has to do so with respect and with effective communication to the rank and file about why such pain is necessary. Every company everywhere must have an effective strategy for ensuring that its remaining employees don’t lose hope or happiness, just as it must maintain its focus on creating brand loyalty.

One thing to do is to make sure that all employees share the pain equally. If there are big cutbacks anywhere, senior management should take substantial pay reductions and limits on its privileges, such as fewer business class flights and trips on private jets. The troops look to senior management for direction. If those troops see the top brass caring for itself at the expense of others, the spirit of the entire organization erodes.

In today’s economy you can’t get by on decent prices or acceptable service. You have to stand out and win the hearts of your customers. To do that you have to go beyond satisfaction to true loyalty. You have to provide a compelling reason, beyond basic service and price, for consumers to choose you. And your organization must be unified in that mission.

---

Source:
http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/24/united-airlines-lessons-leadership-managing -mistakes.html