Think of mystery shopping, and you may well think of just retail environments and measuring customer service. Yes, both of these areas are hugely popular, but there are a whole host of other areas where mystery shopping programmes can assess and grow your business.
We understand how frustrating it can be when you have put a load of work into setting out the perfect customer experience plan and then not seeing the benefits in your sales figures.
As an experienced mystery shopping provider with clients from across the world; we can safely say we’ve tested a huge variety of areas from hospitality and retail to education, care, recruitment, finance and transport.
Too often we see businesses relying on online reviews as a measure for their customer experience, when in reality we only need to ask our friends and family (and ourselves!) how often we tend to leave reviews to understand how unreliable that data really is.
Here’s how mystery shopping programmes can benefit you.
1.) Use a mystery shopping programme as a tool to improve team performance, not just to measure output.
The best way to use mystery shopping is as a tool, to ensure good customer experience is being delivered by the team.
A well-designed programme sets out clearly to teams what is expected of them whilst serving each customer, and includes questions on the assessment form that are designed to drive performance. The best companies involve their team in the assessment areas to further drive engagement – after all, it’s your team who know your customers best!
Mystery shopping regularly (even if it’s only once every 6 months!) will increase the performance of your team without you having to do much else.
Teams won’t know when the mystery shopper is going to come (or how often) so they actively look out for the mystery shopper (99% of the time they get it wrong!) and so your customers benefit from receiving great service every time.
The feedback can then be used to share examples of best practice and reward examples of good service that may have otherwise gone unnoticed.
2) Obtain insight on the entire customer journey, not just the service element.
As important as it is to understand how teams perform as part of a mystery shop – it’s also really useful to find out how the whole customer journey is working – and whether it’s working as you’d expect. Are automated emails working and being received as they should? Are telephone systems easy to navigate? Can they find the information on your website and make their order successfully? Assess these to truly understand your customer’s experience and use feedback to improve it.
3.) Improve staff recruitment and retention
Not sure why you’re struggling to recruit or retention is low? Mystery employees offer the ideal solution to fully assess your HR. From recruitment to working day to day in your employment, mystery employees provide a clear analysis of how your onboarding process is truly performing. Find out more on Mystery Employees on our dedicated blog here.
4.) Compliance
Most businesses have industry and government guidelines where certain standards must be adhered to. If your business operates within the education, care or fundraising sectors, you’ll know how important it is to have regular audits. Our specialist teams can:
- Test scenarios that include an area of vulnerability
- Review security protocols
- Measure education test centres’ compliance to government standards in regards to ID.
As well as a whole host of other scenarios!
4.) Benchmarking and competitor analysis
Has your company checked its position in the marketplace against competitors? If the answer’s yes, or even “I don’t know”, we can benchmark you against competitors by service or price, working within Market Research Society guidelines. Our team will review your customer experience and compare them against top performing companies in your industry.
This is also a great marketing exercise to see how your customers perceive you, what level your customer service is at (across face to face, email, telephone and social media platforms), and offers an insight into what your competitors are doing better and which strategies they are employing that are working well.
Whatever industry you work in, we’re confident that a bespoke mystery shopping programme would benefit your business in a multitude of ways. To find out more, get in touch with our team on 01409 255025, enquiries@mystery-passengers.com. Or complete an online enquiry form.