Organisations use mystery shopping for various reasons: to help improve customer experience, to track the sales process and to gain a better understanding of how customers are feeling when they come not contact with their business.
These are 5 issues to consider when choosing a mystery shopping company:
1. Understanding Culture: As a first step it is important for a mystery shopping agency to spend time understanding what your business’s customer experience objectives are - both online and offline. What does an ideal customer journey look like, what should happen or not happen, what are your best customer facing staff doing to deliver great customer experiences.
2. Provide Actionable Findings: The mystery shopping agency needs to design a programme that delivers practical insights that you can act on. Check that your mystery shopping programmes not only tracks the process of dealing with customers, but also reports on how well that process is executed. Results should pinpoint the specifics of where customer interactions may be failing, as well as highlighting the excellent performance of staff who go above and beyond expectations.
3. Reliable Mystery shoppers: One of the cornerstones of any successful mystery shopping programme is the quality and support offered to the mystery shoppers themselves. To get the biggest impact for your organisation, mystery shoppers should be properly briefed and fully engaged when conducting mystery shops.
4. Reporting dashboards: Systems vary, but the best reporting platforms provide an instant array of standard reports that will help you drive frontline improvement. Reporting should be easily customisable to your organisation’s requirements. The best reporting dashboards help you to quickly understand customer experience from the macro level with one click drilldown capacity to individual locations, teams or specific issues.
5. Speedy Results: The more timely the feedback, the easier it is to change frontline behaviour. Your mystery shopping provider should be able deliver reports to you within a matter of days and enable the simple distribution of reports throughout your organisation.