Business owners are always looking at ways to improve customer service delivery. In order to grow and achieve excellent customer satisfaction ratings it is imperative to measure the customer buying experience in an objective manner.
What are the key elements to success?
Mystery Shopping exercises allow businesses’ owners to get a quick, reliable and quality feedback from the customers perspective. It is an invaluable tool in aiding the evaluation of teams customer care performance levels, training budgets and company mission statements delivery to core customer sector.
Our clients use Mystery Shopping to:
1. Analysis of competitors:
- Mystery shopping your competitors as potential buyers is essential for well established companies.
- It allows you to get a better knowledge of who your nearest competitors are, there pricing structure and their U.S.P.
- You may identify market niche’s that are not occupied by any of your competitors.
- New market entrants may include mystery shopping exercises in their market research package when formulating and designing a business plan.
2. Review of internal processes and procedures
- Customer buying experience clearly and objectively defined.
- Mystery shopper exercises can help to document step by step the process of buying your services /products or seeking customer support.
- You can detect deficiencies and make alterations to your customer care charter to the benefit of your customers.
3. Evaluate Staff Performance
- Mystery Shopping can be used as a training aid as it will highlight professionalism, helpfulness, integrity, appearance, and knowledge of you team during the buying process.
- Buyers not only buy your services/products, they also buy your team and their credibility.
- This type of mystery shopping can provide key information for your Human Resources department about specific employees.
- We believe that this type of mystery shopping should be performed on an-going basis.
4. Evaluating Point of Sale Material and The Retail Store
- Mystery Shoppers will analyse the overall shopping experience including the cleanliness of the “retail store’, the tidiness of the products displayed, the space allocated to your products in the store, Point of sale merchandise, etc.
- It is important to know how your point of sale looks like when management is not present.
5. Review customer brand perceptions
- Brands aim to connect with certain values and qualities, and these positive aspects should be evident to customers through your team, processes, products, and locations. For instance, if I’m looking to buy a watch for €1,000, I would expect a high-end shop with a dedicated team that offers an excellent buying experience. If any part of the buying process is lacking, I likely won’t make the purchase.
- Mystery Shopping exercises will indicate you if your buyers are perceiving the bran image that you want to or you need to invest more in this field.
These 5 ways can be integrated into 1 mystery shopping exercise. Mystery shopping can analyse and objectively measure staff interactions, the quality of your establishments and the buying experience across your entire company whether it is a franchise or solely owned distribution network.
If you require more information about Mystery Shopping contact me or write a comment!