“What gets measured, gets done” Tom Peters
When location, pricing, and product/services are no longer unique, service is the only differentiator and key to success or failure. Therefore you need to ensure that at all time your service delivery is consistent throughout of all your branches and your brand story is not damaged.
20 benefits of a Mystery Shopping programme:
- Monitors and measures service performance
- Increases customer loyalty
- Increases employee performance
- Monitors legal health & safety requirements
- Improves customer retention
- Makes employees aware of what is important in serving
customers - Reinforces positive employee/management actions with incentive-
based reward systems - Provides feedback from front line operations
- Monitors facility conditions – asset protection
- Ensures product/service delivery quality
- Supports promotional programmes
- Audits pricing & merchandising compliance
- Allows for competitive analyses
- Compliments marketing research data
- Identifies training needs and sales opportunities
- Educational tool for training & development
- Ensures positive customer relationships on the front line
- Reinforces employees’ integrity
- Increase internal and external loyalty
- Ultimately increase profit & business growth
There are several ways to measure your service, but the one I think is the most valuable is Mystery Shopping. Mystery Shopping is to anonymously evaluate customer service, operations, employee integrity, merchandising, and product quality. Its using a professional company to help you create a set of questionnaire responding to your business objectives. Once the questionnaire is set up, the company will send their trained Mystery Shoppers to perform the visits and give an objective feedback of what has happened during their experience with you.
There are many companies nowadays offering services such as Mystery Shopping, my advice: outsource it to a professional company, look for the MSPA (Mystery Shopping Professional Association) logo on their website, I mean, if you are going to do it, do it right and use a company who follows the standard, you can be sure that ethical conduct is followed and that you will be given the right advise. Next is to be very clear of your objectives, what are you trying to achieve out of the Mystery Shopping programme, and last to make a real difference, plan a long term programme, Mystery Shopping should be part of the your CX Strategy and should be monitoring on regular basis, not just as a one off, you won’t get the improvement and you won’t think it’s working.
Follow those steps:
- Measure
- Analyse
- Celebrate success
- Identify improvement opportunities
- Develop new strategies
- Implement the new strategies
- Train your staff
- Measure again…
Don’t give your competitors the gift of your customers, review and adapt constantly to keep your customer loyalty figures high.
A 5% increase in customer retention can lead to an increase between 50-75% in annual profits. (Bain & Company)
DOWNLOAD THE SECRET DIARY OF A MYSTERY SHOPPER TODAY
