Rewards of Employing Secret Mystery Shopping

Secret mystery shopping is a quality monitoring technique that allows you to judge the quality of your company customer related services using a hidden observer. The hidden observer is usually a researcher disguised as a customer who is able to experience what a real customer would experience by way of service and give relevant feedback. There are several benefits of this technique which make it a very popular means of evaluating and improving the quality of customer satisfaction scores. Some of the advantages of secret mystery shopping over traditional research are given below-

1. Accuracy Of Observation – If the CEO or any other senior of the company would walk in, the experience they have is by no means reflective of what a normal customer would experience. Similarly if a quality professional were to walk in announcing who he was, he or she would again experience something different from a regular customer. Only if an unidentified researcher posing as a customer walks in would he be able to experience behavior that approximates real customer situations. Therefore only secret mystery shopping really allows you to find out what is happening in the first place. Is the sales staff helpful, were the store displays in order, and is the communication in line with agreed brand values and the like. 
2. Comparison Shopping – Quality is relative. The evaluation of a company services and products will change depending on competitive offerings. This service allows you to have disguised customers move around in competitive spaces and give you live feedback as regards areas of improvement. You can find out their weak points and strength areas and use the information to your advantage. Most importantly you find out what is important or not important from the customer point of view.
3. Neutral Or Third Party Point Of View – Secret mystery shopping also allows a completely unbiased, not to mention professional view of customer services. This is important since internal people have a tendency to develop a blind spot however good their intentions or expertise.
4. Customer Point Of View – The best part of this technique is that it is customer oriented and therefore more likely to spot errors. It is as one would call it outside – in rather that inside-out. It works with the customer as the focus point and not the product or service as is usually the case. As a result you are able to spot errors better or make improvements that the customer could encounter or notice.
5. Stress Tests – Lastly, secret mystery shopping allows you to test the system with extreme kinds of possibilities.  You can arrange for an angry irate shopper, rude shopper or even a badly dressed shopper, depending on what you think the weak points of your company staff are. Did the staff also become rude, did the badly dressed customer not get the standard service, did the staff make attempts to calm or understand the customers behavior will be some of the questions you will need to ask at the end of the exercise. Depending on how the customer is handled you can determine your need for retraining or even rehiring.

Interestingly companies have noticed a clear improvement after making the results of such an exercise known. People obviously have a tendency to put up a better show if they think they are being watched. So it is a good idea to let telesales know that some calls are heard or recorded. It is even better to play back some actual interactions to make sure that everybody is on their best behavior when speaking to customers.

Similarly when you employ a service for secret mystery shopping , it may be a good idea to prepare the staff in advance. But in that case you must ensure that you actually do record actual behavior and play it back to them to ensure that there is no credibility loss for the management.

These tips are universal to any business from Columbia car storage to Oakland retailers to New York bankers employing quality assurance services.

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Disclamer: This entry is intended to promote our partner StorageMart and some or all participants received compensation.

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