Mystery Shopping Programme

In our many years of experience, we have yet to come across any employee unimpressed or unmoved by a thorough and personalised report written by a customer about his/her performance. Let’s just take a moment to think about it – if a complete stranger, be it a customer or a mystery shopper, provides you with a comprehensive report on how efficient you have been on your job, and on top of that, suggests ways to improve the areas that could optimise the quality of customer service, wouldn’t you be impressed?

Mystery Shopping Programme provides a mechanism where your organisation can help employees to improve in this way. Nevertheless, some people still prefer to push it aside due to ignorance or poor implementation. Once implemented correctly, mystery shopping can lead directly to more cheerful staff, more satisfied customers and ultimately, bigger profits.

It is important that the findings of each mystery visit or mystery call is fed back to the employees. The results are usually well received if they are presented in a positive manner. Mystery shopping is not about catching employees red-handed while doing something undesirable. Rather, it is meant to recognise their skills and efforts in delivering excellent service.

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Mystery shopping can be applied in any industry, although the more common venues are banks, retail stores, food & beverage outlets, hotels, government departments, car dealerships, and healthcare industry. Actually, any business that has a customer can benefit from the mystery shopping programme.

 

Consistency In Customer Experience

People are creatures of habit – we enjoy having expectations, and then having them fulfilled. As a result, our happiness with any given experience is usually based on the expectations we have of it. This makes consistency of service a fundamental attribute of excellence of service.

Mystery shopping ensures businesses are doing everything they can to deliver an in-store engagement as expected to create a consistent customer experience. An experienced mystery shopper will paint a detailed portrait of how competent employees are at their jobs – delivering customer service with or without the presence of the manager to supervise them.

 

Immediate Results For Action Plans

Mystery shopping and customer satisfaction survey data are most effective when integrated into one model – the first giving shape to the second. The objective of customer satisfaction survey is to determine what matters to customers, and how their perception of their experience drives loyalty, referrals, and ultimately, sales. Mystery shopping allows business owners to measure specific, observable behaviours and attributes that create customer perception.

One of the greatest mystery shopping benefits lies in the interpretation of the data and translation into actionable change. Too often, even when insightful data is mined from a mystery shopping programme, businesses lack initiative and expertise to take action. We wish to work closely with you to assist in the interpretation of the data to ensure that delivery reports are comprehensible to you and your employees. With our experts to identify and determine actions to be taken, closing the gap will be cost-effective and time-saving for you and your organisation.

 

Justification Through Objective Assessment

You work inexhaustibly to get the recognition from the management. So, you deserve to know if your plans, goals and training are being effectively and appropriately implemented. Naturally, you wish to know if the payoff is worth the effort.

By sending in a mystery shopper to act as a genuine customer, you discover not only your customer’s experiences and perceptions, but also new opportunities as well as potential threats the mystery shopper notices in your business. While some mystery shoppers may have been to your stores in the past, others will be experiencing something totally fresh, with no biases that will influence their judgment.

These mystery shoppers are able to provide feedback on the exterior and interior of the shop, display and deco of the shop, staff service and attitude, staff knowledge and competencies, cashier service, queue time, etc.

 

From Companywide To Nationwide

Deploying a mystery shopping programme could be tedious and wearisome to the internal employees of businesses. To give you peace of mind, let us take over the operational tasks and take care of the logistic planning. Our expertise lies in organising field work across departments, states and regions.

Businesses with nationwide branches normally need to measure staff performance, marketing initiatives and KPI achievement at locations around the country. They require unbiased, consistent and swift data for decision making. Mystery shopping fulfills all these objectives, and provides feedback on specific products or marketing outcome, thereby saving R&D dollars on high-priced focus groups.

A customised evaluation can be implemented at a specific location within a specific period of time based on your needs and budget. Mystery shopping is also one of the low-cost methods to provide first-hand information to the business owner before a full release of a new product/service.

 

Competitive Benchmarking And Internal Competition

Monitoring the competition is one of the priceless benefits of mystery shopping. The most resilient businesses are always on top of ongoing and insightful understanding of their competition. Many businesses conduct competitor mystery shopping to benchmark themselves against a well-recognised market leader to know where they rank in the industry and key customer loyalty areas. In order to out-manoeuvre competitive threats, it is essential to understand the strengths and weaknesses of competitors and gain competitive advantage needed to increase profits and market share.

Though the organisation as a whole benefits from competitive benchmarking information supplied by mystery shopping programme, front liners and operational staff are usually more interested to know how they and their stores perform when compared internally with other staff in other stores from different locations.

The mystery shopping programme will only continue to grow if the results of the mystery shopping programmes are shared with front liners and operational staff. In order to nurture their interest, rewards, incentives and promotions should be introduced to recognise the top performers amongst them. We should never doubt the effect of healthy competition and mutual inspiration on our self-motivation to do our best!

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Stage 1: Initiating

Before implementing a mystery shopping programme, it is important to set clear and well-defined objectives and expectations. We will help you to identify your customer touch points and what the customer experience is supposed to look like.

The next crucial stage is to set the questionnaire right in order to get the mystery shoppers to pay attention to the things you wish to focus on. We will work alongside with you to design the questionnaire with the correct wording and objectivity, and with appropriate weighting of scores.

 

Stage 2: Implementing

Most businesses connect with their customers at three main touch points: onsite/face-to-face, over the phone, and on the Web. To correlate with these, you can choose from the various methods of evaluations: onsite visit, mystery call or online evaluations.

Common or special scenarios can be established, including the scripts. Mystery shoppers are “spies” in disguise. They disguise as ordinary nondescript patrons to shop, patronise, or dine. Sometimes, they can also conduct undercover surveillance to observe your employees’ integrity or collect evidence to help resolve any dispute.

So, how do we determine the frequency and number of visits? In order to set a benchmark performance, mystery shoppers will assess (shop/call) the same store at least two to four times to provide an objective picture, so no employee can excuse himself/herself by saying, “I was having a bad day.”

 

Stage 3: Investigating

How often have you suspected your employees might be cutting corners or disregarding the procedure and policies of your business? Have you suspected untrustworthy or slothful employees, but need more evidences to take disciplinary action against them? A mystery shopper can be deployed for undercover investigation to provide you with concrete evidence, and possibly, even peace of mind.

The mystery shoppers will observe and make enquiries based on a pre-determined scenario or context. They will then report on the quality of service at your stores, the treatment they receive from your employees, and be your “eyes and ears” to gather evidence, or act as professional witnesses, if necessary.

 

Stage 4: Integrating

When the field work is completed, the mystery shoppers will submit their findings and reports in any form of format you like your reports to be presented. Generally, our clients prefer to gain access to all information with minimum effort. With our online portal, the Client Dashboard, you will be provided with an at-a-glance, graphical view of the survey results. Or, you can receive the completed surveys sent directly to your inbox on an automatic email delivery.

The Aggregate Service Excellence Report is designed to be delivered at different organisational levels: regional manager, area manager, branch manager, etc. The information can be configured to reflect your own organisation hierarchy with capabilities that go far beyond the simple drill-down from company level right down to location level.

With over 15 customisable and configurable reports covering all aspects of organisational performance, including trending, ranking, survey, question and answer analysis, verbatim and exceptions analysis, you are guaranteed to have a thorough view of your performance at any point in time and business dimension. All reports are available for download in PDF and Excel formats. You can easily copy and paste portions of the report into your PowerPoint presentations. Everything is literally at your fingertips!

 

Stage 5: Improving

The million-dollar question is what you can do with the data and findings. It is essential to follow through with actionable plans and strategies. Using mystery shopping as a development and improvement tool rather than a spying tool reaps more rewards and successes.

Mystery shopping reports can be used for training and coaching purposes. The results and narratives can be shared with the employees to provide timely feedback, especially to those who were observed during the visits. Training and coaching provided in a timely manner can shape employees’ behaviours. The effect is multiplied if a proper reward system is implemented to reward employees who did great in mystery shopping programme. Hence, indirectly you prove to your employees that your main purpose is to recognise and reward, and definitely not to micro-manage and punish.

A concise and detailed written report that cites examples when used in a constructive manner can bring changes that improves customer experience and enhances business performance. The positive results from top performers can be identified as best practices to be shared across the organisation so that good examples and practices can be replicated. To take it further, organisations should look into updating their Standard Operating Procedures (SOP’s) to include any changes observed from mystery shopping reports.

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