Mystery shopping and its importance for stores

Mystery shopping, also known as secret shopping, is the method by which a store or a company evaluates its employees’ performance. In this a person in disguise pretends to be a shopper, visits the store, interacts with the employees and assesses their ability to build a rapport with the customer in order to sell their products. That person is actually hired by the store owner or the company proprietor to, assess the performance of employees and in the end submit the report to the proprietor. The person hired is called mystery shopper.

Apart from evaluation of performances, mystery shoppers analyze other commercial aspects of retail stores. These aspects could be price, availability, and quality of the product; customer service via websites, telephones and in person; and house keeping. The freelance professionals called secret shoppers then hand over their assessment to the company head who actually hired them.

There are no essential requirements to be a secret shopper, as shoppers don’t have specific appearance or qualification. Those who have a flair and passion to enhance the customer service and the quality of the product can plunge into secret shopping. It would be interesting to learn that the secret shoppers are paid for their job. It is a profession just like any other profession.

Although the job entails shopping which is fun, mystery shopping is a serious business and should be carefully dealt with. There must be certain innate traits within a person that would be helpful in being a secret shopper. These traits are the ability to act or pretend, being trustworthy, reliable and professional. Apart from all these, secret shoppers should have a better mode of transportation, good writing skills and a clear perspective of actual reporting and their personal opinion so that the truth is not tampered.

The stores make use of mystery shopping to uplift their sales by improving customer satisfaction. Secret shoppers are hired wholely and solely to increase sales by improving the performance of the employees. Mystery shopping is useful not just for evaluating the staff’s performance but also for checking the customer service offered by the rival business. It can be compared with one’s own customer service to find the problem areas. The problems can then be rectified to increase the number of customers and hence the sales.

Before hiring a mystery shopper make sure to inquire about the services that the shopper has in hand, do the research well before hiring. Conducting an audit of the employees is a tough job as it is mandatory that they do not get prior information regarding this exercise otherwise they will not present their true picture at the time of scrutiny.

A store manager keeps a vigil on his employees while they deal with the customers in person and over the phone. This often makes the employees nervous and they become inadvertent under pressure. Instead a mystery shopper brings out the true picture of the employees as they perform naturally. This helps to locate the fault and the drawbacks of each and every employee perfectly which subsequently helps in improving customer satisfaction. Sometimes the customers inquire about the products over the phone before coming to the store. In this situation, the employee’s ability to converse with them over the phone, in order to convert the caller into a potential customer, matters the most. To locate the faults of the employee, some fake calls are required, and only a professional mystery shopper can do it. A store can avail the same kind of services provided by the companies for the product distribution and marketing. Mystery shoppers are hired by the companies to find out what the customers think about the new product that hits the market.

Mystery shoppers are known by many names like virtual customers, evaluators in disguise and spotters but they solve only one purpose of enhancing the customer service of a store and increasing its sales.

article courtesy of AssessmentCompetency.com
author: Joseph Then

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.

Un-Boxing Experiences

25 years of blood, sweat and tears building a leading brand, millions invested; but it all works when that same customer walks in again and again with a smile on her face… all vaporized because a staff member treated them like a self serve moron. Disappointed as she is she sends out a message through her blog, twitter and facebook accounts to her trusted network that the brand is no more.

And still leaders of today do not invest pro-actively in front line staff. Some of us try to join in the web 2.0 processes by getting bloggers on our side or by reactively fixing the problem. Still these leading brands box front line performance as a staff expense and not as a crucial realization of the branding efforts. Can we please un-box and accept the experience economy is here to stay?

I just became an Ambassador of the Mekong Riverview hotel in Luang Prabang in Laos. It’s not an official title, Ambassador, just a term I use for being an amazingly loyal customer. As a self claimed experience specialist, I guarantee you will be amazed by the people who run this place. The thing is I haven’t even visited it yet but plan to do so 2 months from now. But I am a fan and I will promote them to the world. Daniel, the manager there, has been able to build my experience even before I visited the hotel.

The hotel is based in Laos PDR which can also be described as “Laos Please don’t rush,” the same attitude many professionals around the world demonstrate when it comes to front line branding experiences. A marketing effort brought me to the Mekong Riverview hotel, a beautiful hotel, but the hotel’s team itself made it clear to me that I should spend my dollars on them. And for Laos, believe me, it’s not the cheapest hotel and the city does have fancier hotels at comparable if not lower rates.

Hoteliers are known to be active in an industry that is somewhat old fashioned. The organizational structure, marketing initiatives and product offer are not always as fancy or innovative. Yet here I was begging for a room at this hotel after they informed me all large rooms were booked. Are the clichŽs true? Are consumers really prepared to pay more for the right experience?

In one key aspect Hoteliers are leading the world; it’s the realization that once a customer walks in to your environment, their work really starts. It’s the realization that once customers honor us with their visit we can create value, a long lasting friendship and make them our ambassadors who will promote and sell our brand for life.

And somehow retailers and other industries believe it’s not the case for them simply because the level of interaction between customer and staff is not the core of their existence. They are in the business of margins and costing. Customers buy shoes and bags; guests buy smiles and warmth?? Apologies for those 10 retailers around the world who do act on this or the other retailers who do have service or experience in their mission statement which is a nice start.

We box things so we can understand and make sense of things, and any investment in the frontline has to be boxed which again will relate to costs and margins. Is it staff related? Then it must not exceed 3% of store sales. These boxes have a purpose and they make sense. They also aid in terms of keeping control and we can’t simply blame middle management for not being entrepreneurial or breaking out of these boxes. Or can we? How do you change ancient ways of doing it? It’s time to make that step and fortunately some of us are. Some of our luxury brand clients in Japan started benchmarking with Hotels instead of with just each other. We sit them down together with Hoteliers to share best practices. It’s time to stop only acknowledging that retaining a customer is far more cost effective than replacing one.

It’s time to stop using powerful words like excellent service and great experiences in the mission statement or statements like “once a customer always a prospect”.

It is time to act.

Let’s look at the hospitality model of The Hotel School The Hague (Netherlands), consistently ranked in the top three hospitality schools in the world.

This “simple” model shows where the experience is created. The experience is not just made by the offer itself; it is finalized where offer and demand meet which is at the front line of the organization. Conventionally retailers have been investing in working on either sides and not so much on where it meets. We claim we do, but we don’t. We research and invest in marketing on the demand side, so people love of us and want to visit us, and then we make sure we have the right products/ services in place at the right price in the right environment. Customers pay us money for this. Oh, let’s not forget to hire some staff because unfortunately we can’t automate the last steps and someone needs to get the right size and wrap it all up.

We acknowledge that a nasty staff member could well have a negative impact on a possible purchase or loyalty; perhaps he or she should be removed, perhaps average staff should be trained again next year, yes we should monitor, coach and reward them; but in reality we don’t seriously. The budget does not fit the box and please don’t rush this. So we lose a 25 year loyal customer and a bunch of her friends and family members with it. Who knows what the (lifetime) value of that is? Well, Ritz Carlton does know actually. And let’s start calling customers guests like hoteliers do.

The most positive factor in the process is that the easiest element to influence, to get to that great experience, to actually get guests to make that purchase, is your people at the front line. The front line teams finalize everything that you put in the mix. It is by far the cheapest investment to be made as long as you don’t box it, but see it as part of the brand experience.

Front line staff leaves us; they are not capable, they only want a dollar per hour more, they are not motivated…they make up excuses; they don’t show up for work. But when we invest in them, give them attention, give them concrete and actionable feedback, train and coach them; they will reward you with loyalty, passion and they will make things happen. They will build your brand to an extent you can’t imagine.

It’s just like any other relationship, if you don’t build it, it will never grow or it never actually existed. Let’s pick up the speed and un-box the ancient way of doing.

My two cents.

article by: Jan Willem Smulders
courtesy of MysteryShoppingLive.com

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.”