Comment: Mystery Shopping: The Agent of Change

Frontline staff are vital to the success of a company. As the public face of your company, they are brand guardians, outwardly expressing all the positive and negative faces of your company and brand, with both good and bad customer service experiences impacting sales significantly.

Service is the Key

The value of an effective advertising campaign can be wiped out in seconds by poor customer service. Whilst companies exert significant funds on marketing and advertising, they need to consider how resources should be allocated to create the desired brand experience through the employee's interaction with the customer.

Customer service has become important to an increasingly demanding public. Research by Grass Roots called 'Are You Being Served', showed over 10 years, that the quality of customer service has fallen by 3.3%, with customer satisfaction falling by 1.6%. Over a quarter of shoppers (26.3%) would not recommend the store they visited to friends or family.

With the Internet allowing customers to research and make purchase decisions before they visit a store, staff must now deal with customers with prior knowledge.

Monitoring Service Levels

The key to ensuring staff deliver effective customer service is through mystery shopping - a customer service evaluation tool that allows companies to assess the levels of customer service across their stores.

Market Research versus Mystery Shopping?

With mystery shopping, individual locations and respondents can be identified, whereas in market research they are concealed. Mystery shopping delivers targeted evidence highlighting individual customer service problems, so that companies can get to the heart of the issue on a store-by-store basis.

Tailored reports can be delivered to branches in real time following a mystery shopping visit, ensuring a swift and action-orientated response whereby staff can be rewarded or retrained where appropriate.

The Benefits of Mystery Shopping

Well-conceived mystery shopping campaigns improve customer service and build greater staff engagement and retention, thereby contributing towards increased sales figures and brand recognition.

Mystery shopping should be an active and engaging exercise, viewed as an agent of change - inspiring people and stimulating results, rather than being a box ticking exercise.

There is a vast gap between just doing your job, and delivering great service. Basic checklist programmes deliver a measurement of whether staff are adhering to orders and delivering advice in the right sequence, but mystery shopping goes a step ahead.

Computer Says No!

The 'Little Britain' TV sketch cleverly demonstrated the worst in customer service. While the character ticked a few customer service boxes, her attitude and general malaise left much to be desired. It is worth remembering that while things may go wrong during the purchase process, customers are generally more forgiving when treated with respect and warmth.

To build a work force that understands customer needs and strives towards a better experience you need four basic ingredients that together create a recipe for successful employee motivation.

1. Communication:

Make employees clear on what is being asked of them and crucially, why? Staff often perform badly as they misunderstand what is expected of them. A mystery shopping programme should inspire managers to reassess the part they play in maintaining great customer service.

2. Education:

A successful mystery shopping programme should be used as a 'wand of change' rather than a 'punishment stick.' If mystery shopping is seen negatively by employees, it will be resented and feedback will be challenged and rejected, rendering the research ineffective.

Employees should be offered an emotional connection with a brand because if they don't care about it they will not 'sell' it effectively to customers. Brand resonance can be built by educating on company philosophy, history and products. Empowered staff will be confident and prepared in answering customer questions effectively.

3. Measurement:

Well-constructed mystery shopping programmes have a set of defined goals matching specific needs of individual employees, so they understand their core targets and objectives. Programmes should also be tailored to the client's needs, to ensure they tackle specific issues.

This could include concentrating on till transactions, for instance, if this is an underperforming area. Instant reporting, either online or by video, ensures that results are quickly fed back, to quickly identify problems and highlight suitably tailored training programmes.

Customer benchmarking can also be developed to help measure why certain customers go elsewhere. Armed with this insight, targets can then be set to win customers back.

4. Reward:

Success must be recognised and incentives are key to motivating and rewarding staff. The recognition and reward of good customer service encourages employees to perform at peak level, whilst providing others with a strong example to follow.

In brief

While customer expectations and retail competition expands, mystery shopping remains an important part of the marketing toolkit. As part of a thoughtful mix of communication, education, measurement and reward, marketers have can use it to create their desired brand experience.

Nigel Cover is a Director at Grass Roots.