Mystery shopping - the agent of change
Agent of change - Admap magazine, January 2008
Customer service affects every area of our lives almost every day, of every week, of every year. It is the man behind the till at the petrol service station, the lady in the café serving you the double espresso, and the person you ring to talk through your gas bill. The standard of service you receive from these different people determines your thoughts and feelings – and ultimately purchase decisions – towards retail outlets, services and brands.
The Ideal Scenario
Picture the scene. You want to purchase a DVD Player, but require help in deciding on a model. Entering a store, you are welcomed by staff who listen to your needs and explain all the essential information. You leave the store, purchase in hand, confident the right choice was made based on great customer service. In future you will return to the store and recommend it to your friends.
Contrast this with a scene where, on entering the store, staff ignore you, then, when you eventually get their attention, give bad product advice, or simply are not attentive to your needs. You vow never to return and will certainly never recommend it to others.
Frontline staff are vital to the success of a company. They are the public face of your company and your brand guardians, outwardly expressing all the positive (and more often than not, if the service is bad, negative) values of your company or brand.
Service is the Key
While it is a well-documented fact that advertising campaigns can cost many millions of pounds, the beneficial and positive brand messages generated by a good ad execution can be wiped out in seconds by poor customer service. So whilst many companies devote significant funds to marketing and advertising, they need to consider how resources should be allocated to create the desired brand experience through the employees’ interaction with the customer. What use is it having one of the most eye-catching branding campaigns around, if customers walk into one of your stores and are put off purchasing anything due to the poor level of service they receive?
Customer advice and service has become even more important to an increasingly sophisticated and demanding public, who understand what good customer service means. Expectation and behaviour has shifted. In a research study undertaken by Grass Roots called Are You Being Served?, results showed that across the past ten years, customer service has fallen by 3.3%, while customer satisfaction has fallen by 1.6%. Overall, just over a quarter of shoppers (26.3%) would not recommend the store they visited to friends or family.
Furthermore, in our digital age, the internet allows self-educated experts to research a product online and make potential purchase decisions before they even leave the comfort of their own home. This presents even more challenges, as customer facing staff go head-to-head with members of the public who are now experts in their own right.
The key to ensure that staff deliver the correct levels of service to customers at the grass roots lies in mystery shopping, a fundamental tool that can be used to evaluate customer service, enabling companies to assess the levels of customer service across their stores.
Market research versus mystery shopping?
Although there are technical similarities, mystery shopping is fundamentally different from market research: the beauty of mystery shopping is that individual locations and respondents can be identified, whereas in market research they must be concealed. This delivers vital and targeted evidence highlighting individual customer service problems, so that companies can get to the heart of the issue on a store-by-store basis.
Technology means that tailored reports can be delivered to branches in real time following a mystery shopping visit, ensuring a swift and action-orientated response. Fast results can be acted upon, staff retrained where necessary, and, just as importantly, rewarded where appropriate.
Client companies can be challenged with mystery shopping in order to say; “This is what your brand experience was like yesterday! What are you going to do about it today?” A well constructed programme allows managers to intervene at the heart of a problem and most importantly, to strike while the iron is hot.
Mystery shopping’s benefits
The benefits of a well-conceived mystery shopping campaign are numerous: An improvement in customer service; greater staff engagement; and thus better staff retention. In turn, this should increase sales figures and brand recognition across the spectrum. This is why so many successful companies see the huge benefit of investment in mystery shopping.
At Grass Roots, we advocate that at the heart of mystery shopping should be a programme that engages the various parties - employees, channel partners and customers. We believe that mystery shopping should be viewed as an agent of change - inspiring people, stimulating results - rather than an exercise that simply ‘ticks boxes.’ It should encourage staff to be inquisitive and positive towards customers, building relationships with them - an active rather than a passive exercise.
While mystery shopping can assess whether a customer service representative greeted the customer in the correct way, or offered them the right product, there is a vast gap between just doing your job, and delivering great service with meaning and passion. Some of the more basic checklist programmes simply deliver a measurement of whether staff are adhering to orders and delivering factually correct advice in the right sequence.
Computer says no!
The popular TV comedy show Little Britain sketch, ‘Computer says no’, cleverly captured the attention of the Irish public, effortlessly demonstrating the worst in customer service. While the character may have ticked many of the boxes on a checklist, her malaise and general attitude clearly left much to be desired. After all, it is worth remembering that while things may go wrong at points during the purchase process, customers are far more likely to forgive you if staff are warm and welcoming.
But how do you create a work force that understands customer needs and strives to create a better experience for them? In our experience, there are four basic ingredients that, when added together, create a recipe for successful employee motivation.
1. Communication
Employers need to make sure that it is absolutely clear that employees know what is being asked of them and crucially, why? Many managers or team leaders fall into the trap of issuing instructions without setting them in context or conveying how their role fits into the overall picture. Often, ill performing staff act in the way they do because they have not been shown how to deal effectively with customers, or they do not understand what is expected of them.
A properly constructed mystery shopping programme should inspire managers to reassess the part they play in maintaining great customer service, because sometimes change needs to come from above, as well as below.
2. Education
A fundamental element of any successful mystery shopping programme is that it must not be used as a ‘stick to beat people with’, but should be used as a ‘wand of change’. If mystery shopping is seen in a negative light by employees it will be resented, and consequent individual feedback will be challenged and rejected, rendering the research impotent and useless. Where levels of service are below par, employees should be retrained.
Part of educating employees is to ensure they have a resonance with the brand and an emotional connection with it. This is vital to good customer service because if an employee does not care about a brand, they will not ‘sell it’ effectively to their customers. One way to build resonance is to ensure that staff have great knowledge of the brand, such as its history, philosophy and current products. Education is empowering. If staff feel empowered, they will be ready and prepared to deal with customers, because they know they can answer all the questions they have.
Another technique to retrain employees is to bring behaviour from individuals’ home lives into the workplace. For example, it is useful for staff to reflect on the difference in their behaviour when welcoming a friend to visit compared with how they welcome customers coming through the door on a daily basis. This technique introduces reality and emotion to create a more engaging process. It forces an internal reflection on their own behaviour, by effectively making staff ‘look in the mirror’ to see how they behave in front of a customer, heightening consciousness and opening the door to better customer interaction.
3. Measurement
Any well-constructed programme should have an overall set of defined goals for individual employees, so they understand their core targets and objectives. Built into this, the mystery shopping programme should be tailored completely to the clients’ needs, so they are able to tackle specific issues in depth.
Examples of this may include a retail store that wishes to concentrate on till transactions, if this is an area where customer service is underperforming, or a DIY store that wishes to increase staff product knowledge. Instant reporting, such as online or video technology, ensures that results are quickly fed back to individual branches, helping to immediately identify problems highlighted by the research, leading to training programmes specifically tailored to deal with the issues.
Customer benchmarking can also be developed via mystery shopping and will help to measure why certain customers go elsewhere. Armed with this insight, targets can then be set to win customers back.
4. Reward
Success needs to be recognised and incentives are a key area in motivating and rewarding staff. Read almost any employee survey and a cry for greater recognition is invariably high up on the wish list. The recognition and reward of good customer service, both before and after a mystery shopping campaign, will encourage employees to continue to perform at the top level, whilst providing others with a strong example or model with which to follow.
So, while customer expectations continue to grow and retail becomes increasingly competitive, mystery shopping will remain an important part of the marketing toolkit. As part of a thoughtful mix of communication, education, measurement and reward, marketers have every chance of creating the brand experience they seek.
Mystery Shopping in Practice
We work with a variety of national and international clients, helping them to achieve business excellence via their mystery shopping programmes. One international high-street bank approached them with an aim to achieve a better picture of their customer service skills and to be sure they were continuously attracting, retaining and developing customers.
This reflected the bank’s competitive edge in their desire to be the best in the way that their staff personally identify and satisfy the needs of potential and existing customers.
A mystery shopping programme was created to measure the customer journey for one of their accounts. This involved mystery shoppers - all of whom were selected to match the customer profile, making them more credible - opening an account with the bank and conducting ‘real’ transactions.
The programme took into account branch characteristics, so that larger branches were visited more frequently. Competitor branches were also included for benchmarking purposes. Each branch received a report on the entire visit, which included: first impressions; queue time and handling; enquiry handling; establishing customer needs; product knowledge and recommendations; closing the enquiry; and overall experience.
The programme was designed to focus on the behaviour of branch staff and to identify how they interacted with customers, whilst delivering the requisites necessary during the process. The behaviour of staff and process they took were comprehensively reported, and clear findings were supported by detailed verbatim comments.
In the spirit of fairness and communication, the programme allowed branches to appeal if any part of the visit was disputed, although there was generally an appeal rate of well below 1% - confirming buy-in at user level. This was particularly significant since branch scores were a factor in the bank’s incentive scheme.
A feature of this particular programme was that branches received regular performance updates presented in a graphical form for ease of understanding. The results have been very positive with the programme providing simple-to-use, actionable management information.
The client now has a programme that has taken their knowledge of the customer’s journey to the next level. The combined use of communication, education, measurement and reward, is making a real difference where it matters most – the in-branch customer experience.