Braintrust Query: Are Mystery Shops ‘Constructively Negative’?

A study published in the November Journal of Marketing attempts to answer two important questions applicable to mystery shopping programs:

1. Are shoppers who expect to evaluate service delivery inclined toward “constructively negative” evaluations regardless of the actual experience?

2. What can be done to reduce the negative bias of survey respondents?

In brief: 1) No. 2) Give them something to think about.

According to the study, when cognitive loading precedes the customer experience it reduces negative bias. We know that when customers expect to complete a survey after visiting a store, they have a natural tendency to focus on negative aspects of the experience in part because those aspects are more easily identified. It’s easier to conclude “My coffee is cold” than it is to conclude “The associate far exceeded the service standard.”

However, when shoppers are asked to pay attention to specific details about an experience beforehand, they are less likely to identify negative aspects of the experience when they occur. Their focus is more positive.

What’s more, the study found that “shoppers do not ‘fabricate’ negative evaluations just to comply with their task. … [T]hey report such evaluations only if they are able to gather supporting evidence during the shopping experience.”

Consider the impact of cognitive loading on:

Shopper training and preparation: Well-trained mystery shoppers should arrive on-site with a high degree of cognitive load that results in a more balanced evaluation. Conversely, poorly trained or unprepared mystery shoppers are more likely to over-report the negative in an effort to fulfill their obligation to report. Thus, ‘constructively negative’ evaluations should be more prevalent among poorly trained shoppers.

Customer experience program goals: Shoppers are more likely to identify negative aspects of the experience if their brains aren’t busy processing shop scenarios and service procedures. If your goal is improved training and employee appreciation (i.e., incrementally positive outcomes), you’ll want shoppers loaded to identify the subtle differences between four-star and five-star service.

Commentary by Kerry Colligan, Integrated Marketing Manager, Second to None

Mystery Shoppers Help Prove the Value of Trade Promotion

Mystery shopping is revealed to be an effective tool in proving the value of trade promotion for manufacturers and retailers alike.

Mystery shopping is revealed to be an effective tool in proving the value of trade promotion for manufacturers and retailers alike, according to the newest white paper offered this month by RitterAssociates, the company that builds great customer experiences.

A critical issue for manufacturers is verifying that trade promotion components outlined in a sales agreement with their retail trading partners are working and capable of providing the anticipated sales lift both trading partners expect. Manufacturers and retailers (grocery stores, convenience stores, department stores, mass discounters, and big box stores) all have a vested interest ensuring the effectiveness of trade promotion spend.

Their search has generally ended with best-in-class technology solutions, but more is required. While trading partners have worked to ensure that the deal is properly understood, executed to plan, and delivers the required return on investment (ROI) at the strategic and operational levels, the use of professional mystery shoppers provides the tactical performance data that complements the collaborative benefits manufacturers and retailers want in their trade promotion programs.

“Industry statistics show that manufacturers can spend in excess of 50% of their marketing budgets on trade promotions”, said Stanley Gene Hart, President of Toledo-based Ritter Associates. “Proving the ROI of trade promotion, and ensuring a degree of compliance with the deal, can be daunting, but not impossible, when used in conjunction with mystery shoppers. Professional mystery shoppers can be deployed nationwide and provide virtually real-time data on a number of trade promotion programs at the retail level.”

Shoppers receive strict guidelines on what to look for and can either conduct their visits anonymously or reveal themselves to store management upon completion of their visit. “Both manufacturer and retailer need to know how well the promotion is working,” added Hart. “They have to be assured that the agreement is carried out properly; otherwise, the results aren’t meaningful and the opportunity to optimize trade spend is lost.”

Author: Julia Unbehend, Public Relations, RitterAssociates, Inc.

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

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

Mystery Shopping Analytics – Out-Executing the Competition

Analytics refers to the gathering and interpreting of data in order to make better business decisions and optimize business processes. In mystery shopping, the most common use of analytics revolves around trying to understand how various interpersonal experience attributes influence customer loyalty measures. Correlations can be determined between loyalty and simple attributes from extending a thank you all the way to product knowledge. How important is it that the customer is thanked? How important is it that the associate smiles when greeting the customer? Answers to these questions allow organizations to more effectively allocate resources and focus on the factors that will bring about the greatest return.

In order to draw confident conclusions on various relationships with these target outcomes using mystery shopping data, it’s critical that the mystery shopping program has three elements:

1. Survey Design: A properly designed mystery shopping survey (analysis friendly).
2. Sample Size: A large enough sample size.
3. Skill: A skilled analyst who understands the client’s business and market research analysis.

Survey Design – Three Critical Design Objectives for Analytics

Survey design plays a critical role in enabling effective analysis of mystery shopping data. Each survey should be developed to include three critical design objectives:

1. Measure the shopper’s overall experience rating against an organizations loyalty measures such as likeliness to return or recommend the store to friends and family.
2. Measure key driver attributes known to influence customer loyalty.
3. Measure variations in performance on key driver attributes over time.

Overall Experience Rating – Net Promoter Score, Loyalty Three, Customer Satisfaction Index
To understand the influence of various experience attributes (e.g. greeting, helpfulness, attitude, etc.) on loyalty, the survey form must include questions relating to overall satisfaction or probable future behavior of the shopper based on the experience. An organization’s customer experience metric (Loyalty Three, Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction Index) might encompass questions such as:

• Based on this experience, how likely would you be to return to this location again?
• If you were in the market for this product, how likely would you be to return to this location?
• Based on this experience, how likely would you be to recommend this location to family and / or friends?

Once this information is gathered, shoppers can be divided into segments and analytics can begin. Identifying the differences and similarities between the experiences of shoppers against the anchors of the Net Promoter Score, Loyalty Three, or Customer Satisfaction Index will reveal attributes that drive motivation to return / recommend and those that do not.

Measuring Key Driver Attributes and Capturing Variations in Performance
A high score doesn’t always equate to a shopper’s intent to return. For example, the associate scored a 95% on the mystery shopping form, but the shopper indicated that she was somewhat unlikely to return again based on the experience with the associate. When this occurs, there are typically two possible causes.

The first is that the survey form simply doesn’t include questions that measure key drivers of loyalty / advocacy (e.g. helpfulness, friendliness, knowledge). Instead, it may be very “compliance” heavy, measuring attributes that don’t influence the customer one way or another.

The second potential cause is that the questions designed to measure these attributes fail to capture varying levels of performance.

• Did the associate greet you? Yes / No
• Did the associate ask questions about your needs? Yes / No
• Did the associate make a recommendation? Yes / No
• Did the associate thank you? Yes / No

Using questions and response options like those above means a great greet, an okay greet and a poor greet are all grouped together as a simple “Yes.” A thank you that makes someone feel valued as a customer and one that seems insincere and scripted are both grouped together. As a result, it’s impossible to know how often great greets are occurring. There is also no way to conduct analytics to determine the influence of a great greet on the overall experience.

Sample Size Considerations

It is important to understand the influence of sample size on the accuracy and validity of analytics. For more information on this, see T&A Consultores CEO Marcelo Tarica and Service Evaluation Concepts CEO Arcadio Roselli’s article titled “Sample Size Calculation in Mystery Shopping Programs.”

Analytic Skill / Capabilities

The final component is finding the right resource to perform the analytics. With an adequate sample size and the right data in hand, a skilled analyst should be poised to engage in high value analytics that can drive decision-making. A skilled analyst will uncover relationships between the key driver attributes and loyalty measures. To tell the story of how performance impacts customer experience, the analyst must consider which statistics to use and how to convey the information in the most effective manner.

Statistical Caution and Top-Box
Using the right statistic can make or break the impact of survey data. If a mean of five is reported, the distribution of responses could have been all fives or half tens and half zeros-either way the mean is five. To assume these two scenarios are equivalent is an obvious misuse of the statistical mean as a productive metric. This is where choosing your statistical measure is vital. One common measure is the top-box, the percentage of surveyed customers who assign an attribute the highest rating; this is in contrast to the bottom-box, the percentage who assign the lowest rating. Depending how the attribute is correlated with the overall loyalty measure or outcome (or dependent variable) we can understand where to focus managerial attention.

Keep it Simple
Most managers don’t have hours to spend interpreting data. To proactively counter this time constraint, even the most complex information must be presented in a simple and visually stimulating fashion. Using cutting-edge statistical analysis programs can aid an analyst in creating thriving dashboards that are both relevant and simple.

Article courtesy of MysteryShoppingLive.com
Authors: Mike Jennings and Nick Vanderheyden