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Category: Mystery Shopping

Is Your Mystery Shopping Program Missing Something?

 

Mystery shopping programs are designed to measure operational standards to ensure that employees follow guidelines and expectations for providing an excellent customer experience. While starting in the traditional sense of onsite evaluations, where mystery shoppers were deployed to visit restaurants, retail stores, and other businesses to evaluate the experience, the programs have expanded over time to incorporate other customer service touch points, such as telephone and website evaluations.

 

One aspect that is still overlooked, but gaining traction in the mystery shopping world, is evaluating social media. How, you ask, can social media be evaluated?

 

Simple. It’s a known fact that social media sites are quickly becoming a channel for customer inquiries, complaints, suggestions, and praise. We are well past the time of businesses simply pushing out content and customers engaging, getting deals, and entering contests. Customers expect more from a company’s social media sites, and it’s a good idea, when planning for 2015, to incorporate social media into the mystery shopping mix.

 

This can be accomplished just as a typical mystery shop is executed. Shoppers will visit a company’s social media sites and pose a question or comment to track:

 

  • Response time
  • Method of response
  • Employee knowledge

 

Direct and indirect communication can be evaluated, especially in instances when companies utilize social media monitoring programs. It is easy to identify social customer service issues through a solid monitoring program, but ensuring that the piece of communication is effectively shared with the appropriate staff, and is responded to in a timely manner, is just as important when evaluating the customer experience.

 

Ann Michaels & Associates recently published a press release highlighting this new component of mystery shopping. New services designed to incorporate social data, whether through direct mystery shopping or data integration into existing programs, were highlighted. As consumers become more demanding and expect strong service levels no matter where they choose to communicate, aligning your 2015 strategies to incorporate social media evaluations will be an important component to your program.

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Mystery Shopping Cures “Growing Pains”

 

We’ve had the pleasure of working with companies of all sizes in many industries. Often, when speaking to potential clients, one theme we hear revolves around “growing pains” as companies expand. During the initial growth, if it’s slow enough, it can be managed easily by visits from management and support as needed. However, as growth continues, or if it happens quickly, it can be much more difficult to ensure operations run smoothly and are consistent across locations.

 

This is perhaps the best time to utilize a mystery shopping program – when you’re at the point of expanding your presence. By using a mystery shopping program, companies reap many benefits:

 

1. Especially when expansion goes nationwide, programs give insight to ensure that things are running smoothly as new locations are opened.

 

2. Implementing mystery shopping can be cost effective. When expansion occurs, the task of monitoring new locations often times falls to District or Regional Managers, who are required to travel from one location to the next. This can be very costly; employing a mystery shopping program is less expensive and can be very effective in assisting upper management with new location maintenance.

 

3. Brand consistency is maintained. By incorporating the right observations, companies can be assured that new locations are maintaining a consistent brand presence, whether this means uniform compliance, store signage and messaging, or operational expectations.

 

4. Snapshots provided by mystery shopping reports can quickly indicate challenges and issues that can be resolved before they get out of control. This measure is extremely helpful to ensure that new locations are successful and support your mission to expand while keeping “growing pains” to a minimum.

 

Below are some tips for companies who are in the process of expanding and would like to use mystery shopping programs to monitor progress:

 

1. Plan ahead: start by initiating a program on your “core” locations, ideally prior to expansion. Develop a program that evaluates the core operating procedures and expectations to gauge performance at this level. Identify any challenges or opportunities for improvement prior to expansion.

 

2. As new locations open, implement the same program to ensure the new locations mirror the core group in terms of performance and expectations. When do you start shopping the new locations? We’ve had clients who prefer to give the new locations a couple of weeks up to a month to “work out the kinks” before incorporating mystery shopping, while others prefer to start right away. Whatever you decide, ensure that the schedule is followed so new locations can be evaluated as soon as possible to ensure success.

 

3. Because expansion is costly, and adding the expense of mystery shopping can be one more thing to add to the plate, consider a schedule that complements your goals. While a regular program is ideal, it may be best to focus on new locations that may show signs of struggling.

In this instance, programming can look something like this:

* Schedule monthly shops at “core” locations to get a continual snapshot of performance

* As new locations open, schedule weekly shops for the first month to gauge performance; after the initial month, if there are no issues that are apparent, change this schedule to monthly shopping.

* When any locations show potential issues, increase shopping frequency for a short period of time to determine if the issues are isolated or a symptom of a larger problem that needs attention or additional training. This can be achieved by dispatching an additional shop for any location that receives a performance score of 79% or below, for example.

 

While growing pains can be expected during any expansion, keeping them to a minimum is a challenge. Incorporate tools and services to alleviate these growing pains in the most cost effective manner possible – you’ll be happy you did in the long run.

 

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Case Study: Small Changes Improve Customer Service

 

With companies now offering a multitude of services, including online and mobile products and services, they are finding that 24/7 customer service is needed to be able to help customers when and where they need it.

 

I came across a case study that revealed how one company responded to this customer need and reduced customer service inquiries by half. The company that was featured is Tagged.com – it is a social site for users to meet and interact with other people. From their website:

 

Tagged makes social discovery products that enable anyone to meet and socialize with new people. Our mission is to help everyone feel love and belonging, and we’re building toward a vision where anyone can use a device to instantly connect with interesting new people anytime, anywhere.

Founded in 2004 and profitable since 2008, Tagged is a market leader in social discovery with over 300 million registered members in 220 countries who make over 100 million new social connections every month. Tagged is based in San Francisco.

 

Because this is a site used at all times of the day and night, the company needed to make sure that customer assistance was available when customers most need it, whenever that may be. As the company grew, they also realized they needed to be more efficient in the way they provided customer assistance.

The company had a self-service help center, with frequently asked questions and information that could help customers with basic information. They also had a support ticket process in place. While this was a good start, the company realized that they needed more in order to maintain strong service levels.

To this end, they implemented a few new procedures to help customers get the help they need:

1. An enhanced self-service portal, with integration of advanced search features that will make it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for. The search features are front and center on the site so it’s easy to find and use.

2. Tagged provided a self-guided tour of the site, how to use it, and how to find the information they need. This would give customers the opportunity to learn how to use the site more efficiently and have many of their questions answered without requiring help from the company.

3. Customers with a premium subscription have chat functionality so they can get their questions answered while they are on the site. This is in addition to their email support tickets, and is only available to those premium members.

While these changes are relatively minor, and did not require a significant addition of staff or spending, the company saw great results in a short period of time. Over a four month period, the company reduced its service tickets from 42,000 service tickets per month to just 20,000 service tickets per month.

It looks like the changes helped significantly. Implementing self-help features and content for customers to get the help they need without contacting customer service can be fairly easy.

1. Start by collecting data related to current inquiries: what are the most common inquiries customers have? Pinpoint the most frequently asked questions and create a self-help page on your website. Make sure it is prominent and easily navigated, as Tagged.com did. Review this information on a regular basis to make sure the content is fresh, relevant, and updated when changes are made to your site.

2. Collect data on the ease of use of your site: ask your customers to provide feedback on your site. How do they use it, what do they like best, what is difficult for them to do while on your site? Take it one step further and employ a mystery shopping company to gather some objective data – shoppers pose as your customers and engage with your site just as your customers do, and provide information on ease of use, functionality, response time to inquiries, etc. Take this information and make changes to create a more user friendly experience.

3. Incorporate “pop up” feedback surveys for new visitors: There are some methods where companies can identify new website users and ask them for feedback. This can be particularly useful in learning why new customers may not use the site, if they were having difficulty, etc. Similarly, identify people who may have registered for your site, but rarely use it. Find out why this may be. It could simply be a case of a user registering for a site that they are no longer interested in using, but you may uncover reasons why people start to use your site and fall off – sometimes people will just stop using a service instead of asking for help when they reach a stumbling block.

The case study revealed how simple changes can make a big impact, and it highlighted some good takeaways for others to learn from.

 

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