Get ready to go undercover
Drive by Friday
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Drive by Friday –
GET READY TO GO UNDERCOVER
I thought I would talk about “Mystery Shopping” this week as it is something I was involved with several years ago with an organisation that wanted to refine its customer service and sales experience. Mystery shopping has been around for many years and was initially developed to sniff out employees in the banking sector with sticky fingers and was predominantly rolled out in the retail sector. It has evolved significantly and now includes direct dialling to companies, undertaking surveys etc to really get an outsider’s perspective on your customer service offering.
The insights you receive will help you to develop, test and deliver experiences worthy of customer loyalty, turning higher profits, and providing an exemplary customer engagement experience. So how do you “mystery shop” your business? Below are a few ideas you should put in place before finding your inconspicuous shopper or shoppers (depending on size of your business) who will test drive the customer experience.
Become crystal clear about the touch points a customer would inevitably experience during a standard consultation on your products and services
The best way to do this would be to create a customer experience map (key touch points) which covers their interactions with your employees and business. List the key touch points you expect to see:
- Is the customer responding well/have you gained their interest?
- Are you winning – is the customer responding and staying engaged?
- Where are the opportunities to do better?
- How are you moving them through each stage of their journey?
These are just examples, and each business will map these in different ways depending on what they are trying to achieve (quicker call times, more engaging calls, consultative, relevant information etc).
Understand the behaviours that you should expect to see at each touchpoint
With each touch point that you establish, you then need to state what your expected behaviours are to support that touch point being the best it can.
For example: when your customer calls in, within the first 2-3 minutes what is it you want to establish or achieve? Is it to provide an initial welcome, find out their name and what their knowledge of Novated Leasing is so that you know how to progress the call/experience?
Establish criteria around this and what you want to achieve in different segments of the call. The key here is to be specific and in doing this you will get transparency around what actually happened on the call, not what you wish could happen.
Track and measure the results to drive improvements
So, you have a set of behaviours and outcomes you want to measure – now to find your inconspicuous friend/s or a professional that you have hired to do your “mystery shopping”.
Once you have measured results, you will need to look at ways to help your customer service team understand their behaviours and how they can help improve the customer experience. Be transparent and share the results with your team, ask for their insight and how you can all work together to refine the experience. This may also include additional training.
Recognise your wins, not just opportunities to improve
You will have some employees who will feel hard done by in the “mystery shopping” process. No one likes to be told they didn’t live up to expectations. But you can manage this process with your team and encourage their involvement – tell them about the positives and negatives.
If you do this activity on a frequent basis, you will start to see some consistent insights and lots of benefits for not only your customers, but also your customer experience team. This is a great exercise to build a team of customer influencers and customer loving champions!
Share your thoughts or ideas on mystery shopping!
PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CONTACT ME
lorraine@simpli-u.com.au