How to Keep Your Mystery Shopping Program Effective Over Time | Confero
What are some helpful tips to keep your mystery shopping program fresh? Also, why should you care to keep your mystery shopper program refreshed?
Questions to Consider as You Consider Your Next Round of Confero Mystery Shop Business Evaluation:
Customer expectations, operational processes, and service channels evolve over time. Mystery shopping programs should evolve as well to remain effective and relevant.
How has your business changed since your first mystery shop evaluation questionnaire? Changes in customer behavior, technology adoption, and operational complexity have permanently reshaped many industries. Has your business added an app that allows patrons to interact with your locations for purchases or reservations? Do your locations or chain utilize social media? How is that integrated into the shopping experience? Do you now offer a loyalty program? All these new approaches to business building should be a part of your mystery shopper business evaluation questionnaire, right?
Utilize Your Mystery Shop Business Evaluation in Different Ways
Additionally, wouldn’t it be terrific if one tool could be utilized in different ways? A mystery shop business evaluation can be! Confero’s mystery shop evaluations work to give you a clearer understanding of your everyday customer experiences in your retail locations. Also, our reports will give you insight into which retail locations are maximizing advertising materials, doing a great job with customer service, following mandatory compliance laws well, the true cleanliness standards of your retail locations will be revealed and more. It goes without saying, that employees who are doing a great job will shine in the reports. Areas that need a bit of retraining or attention will also be made clear.
One tip to keep your mystery shop program fresh is to utilize results to reward employees. This is a major plus to have store employees welcome the program.
Tips to Keep Your Mystery Shop Program Fresh:
Add Excitement:
Keep it exciting and new with performance incentives that motivate teams. With rewards, teams are more likely to have an interest in how they are doing and will want to learn what they need to do to win. Example: Offer employee recognition and on the spot rewards. Reward the entire team so everyone maintains interest.
Include the Digital Interaction:
For stores and restaurants offering a buy online pick up in store (BOPIS) or tablet ordering type scenario, include a technology element in your mystery shops. For stores and restaurants utilizing self-service kiosks or mobile ordering, how effectively do associates support customers using these systems? Overall, how do associates assist customers with technology if needed? Are all well trained to field questions and encourage its use?
Summarize:
Rather than digging for info and creating your own reports, use Confero’s reporting tools to summarize the most relevant results. Focus on the behaviors that drive the scores. Need help choosing which reports to run from our system? Your Confero Client Services Manager will be happy to review reports with you and show you how we may be able to save you time.
Peer to Peer Competition:
Reports allow you to compare your units’ results to scores of others, so you can communicate how associates are doing compared to others, building healthy competition. Comparing also allows for shared experiences and best practices.
Highlight the Good and Bad:
Reveal where associates excelled and highlight actions that need improvement. For example, if all provided a friendly greeting, compliment this. If very few called the customer by name, point out the benefits of using the customers’ names and coach for improvement.
Add More Elements:
If you do not measure how well your associates handle an important customer interaction such as a return, consider adding the scenario to your program. Are employees handling returns according to company expectations? If not, what training needed?
Increase the Weight of a Question:
Mystery shopping results sometimes reveal operational patterns across the entire footprint that deserve additional focus. Do stores consistently miss on greeting customers when they are within five feet? If yes, think about adding an incentive for those who score perfectly in this area during the quarter. Or, consider weighting this question more heavily. Weighting key questions more heavily helps organizations reinforce priorities and focus attention on behaviors that most impact the customer experience.
Research Competition:
How well does the competition meet your sales standards? Do your competitors excel in areas where your associates struggle? Competitive intelligence programs help organizations identify operational strengths, uncover gaps, and better understand how competitors perform within the customer experience landscape.
Revamp Telephone Mystery Shopping:
Do your telephone evaluations capture the service expectations customers experience during real-world support interactions? Take a look at your survey to see if you need to add factors such as hold times, timeliness of a return call, asking for and using the customer name, and associate friendliness.
Rewarding Yourself with A Fresh Look at Your Real World Customer Experience
By recognizing good efforts to assist customers through the results your mystery shopping survey based incentives, it focuses employee attention on good service. Refreshing customer experience measurement programs helps organizations maintain relevant operational insight as customer expectations evolve.
Curious about keeping your mystery shop program fresh, Confero’s team works with businesses to create and to manage evaluation programs. Please feel free to reach out to start a conversation about building a customer audit program for your business.
Curious of what a custom tailored Confero customer experience measurement program can provide? Read more on Confero’s Client Insights page .
