MYSTERY SHOPPING
Understanding the process & designing a
customized programme for your
company with Service ANGELS.
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
What is Mystery Shopping?
• A research tool used by companies to make sure that
employees are performing at levels required to make sure
that good customer service and company policies are being
followed.
• It is the process of assessing customer service anonymously
and professionally from the point of view of the average
educated consumer.
• Trained ‘shoppers’ anonymously evaluate customer service
delivery, employee sales skills, employee integrity, product
quality etc. in order to provide you with an objective view of
how your employees treat your customers and how closely
they are following the training you have provided.
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
Growth of Mystery Shopping
• Mystery shopping is fast becoming a popular and effective
way to monitor customer service for many business across
a wide range of industries - Banks, Hotels, Automotive
Dealerships, Restaurants, Retail Shops, Food Chains,
Cinemas, Clubs, Telecoms, IT companies, Government
departments, local authorities and many more!
• It is a way to make sure that your customer service
employees are treating customers the way they are
supposed to be treating the customers.
• Psychologically, if your employees know that you have a
mystery shopping system in place, they are bound to treat
all customers well all the times - they don’t know who will
be the shopper!
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
Goals of A Mystery Shopping
Programme
A mystery shopping programme can be designed to achieve the
following goals.
• To improve customer service to levels exceeding customer
expectations
• To ensure compliance with policies, standards and procedures
• To enhance staff performance and behaviour
• To enforce employee integrity
• To keep track and benchmark against competition or previous
performance
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
Mystery Shopping vs
Customer Feedback
• Is mystery shopping the same as customer satisfaction surveys?
Can the two substitute one other in terms of assessing an
organization’s performance in its delivery of customer service?
• They are not the same and cannot not substitute one other.
Rather they are complementary- two different sides of the same
coin. They are distinctly different measures providing different
insights into an organization’s service delivery.
• Mystery shopping programmes gather data in the form of
directed observation. Mystery shopping focuses on
understanding what customer delight-driving behaviours look and
sound like. What is it that employees are doing which drives
customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
• On the other hand, customer feedback programmes gather
data in the form of recalled impression. Customer satisfaction
surveys typically asks customer to rate their experience with a
company e.g service, products prices and their feelings towards
the brand
• Can they be substituted? No. Customer feedback is about
impression. Mystery shopping is about observation. Both are
important. They are not interchangeable.
• The balanced approach - The ideal programme is a
combination of both customer feedback data and mystery
shopping observations. Intelligent decisions are based upon good
customer feedback, which is turned into action (employee training
or service standards deployment), which is then, in turn,
measured with a mystery shopping programme to test its
successful implementation.
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
The benefits of Mystery Shopping?
• Measures levels of standards and pin point customer service
weakness areas
• Enhances employees sales ability and increase sales figures
• Identifies focused customer service training needs
• Monitors employee compliance with policy and procedures
• Enforces employee integrity
• Improves customer retention by keeping customers
satisfied all the times
• Compliments staff incentive programmes
• Helps spot problems early enough
• Helps create consistency at national level
• Helps keep track and benchmark again competitors
and previous performance
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
Why Need Mystery Shopping?
A mystery shopping programme will compel your company to focus
on achieving superior customer service standards.
Superior customer service produces satisfied customers.
I. Satisfied customers buy more and become loyal
II. Satisfied customers buy additional products and services
III.Satisfied customers support positive word of mouth
IV. Satisfied customers pay less attention to
advertisements of competitors
V. Satisfied customers deliver more ideas
and suggestions
VI. Satisfied customers cost less because these
customers have already a relation with your company and
some processes might already have been standardized
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
Mystery Shopping can help you answer the following questions:
• Are employees handling telephone enquiries appropriately
• Are your employees friendly, approachable, and knowledgeable?
• What could you do to ensure fewer customers leave with a neutral
or negative brand image?
• Are customers of every age, ethnicity, and gender receiving the
same exceptional level of customer service?
• How engaged are your employees, and how can you optimally improve their
engagement?
• Which locations within your organization are consistent shining examples of offering
customer delight, and what are their best practices?
• What company changes will result in the highest return on investment (e.g., is it more
important to spend resources on shortening customer wait time or on further
customer service training)?
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
Designing A Mystery Shopping
Programme for Your Company
The basic mystery shopping process
1. Setting
Objectives and
Goals:
Service Angels in
co-operation
with Client
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
2. Execution of
MS
Programme:
Service Angels
recruits
shoppers, runs
programme,
collects and/or
analyzes data
3. Review
Findings &
Programmed
Re-design:
Service Angels in
co-operation
with Client
Detailed mystery shopping process
7. Review
Findings;
Repeat
Steps 3-7
1. Setting
Objectives
& Goals
2. Programme
& Survey
Design
6. Reporting
5. Data
Preparation
3. Recruiting
Shoppers
4. Data
Collection
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
The first 2 steps in the process lay the foundation of the
programme
• THE FIRST STEP - Identify your company’s important customer service characteristics and
objectives - often flowing from your strategy and overall goals and objectives. In a large
organisation, it is important to make sure that everyone is on board - from top
management to the shop floor level employee. Share your plan with as many departments
as you can and promote the benefits of mystery shops
• If people have a chance to hear the plan and provide their input before the programme is
finalized, they will be much more likely to support the programme, feel some sense of
ownership, and be ready to take action based on the results.
• Having everyone’s input will help you come up with a good set of service characteristics
and standards.
• THE SECOND STEP is the development of the questionnaire using the variables or
characteristics developed in step 1. Areas of assessment include: customer service,
suggestive selling techniques, headcount, store appearance and organization, merchandise
displays and stock, cleanliness of the location, signage and advertising compliance, time in
line and time elapsed for service, product quality, order accuracy, customer's preferences,
cash handling, and return policies.
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
Making the most of a MS programme
For your MS programme to be successful, it is
imperative that:
• Your staff know that such a programme is in place and
know what is expected of them although you don’t tell
them when the exercise is going to be done
• The measurables are relevant, achievable and oriented
towards your objectives
• Reporting is open
• No victimization as a result of findings
• Incentives are provided for excellent performance
• Managers devise some critical customer service
scenarios
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
Importance of Regular Assessments
• You need to contract for regular mystery shopper
evaluations, on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis
• The evaluation questionnaires should be revised and
refocused from time to time, to reflect changes in a
company’s customer service goals or simply to put more
emphasis on some service aspect.
• Regular reports will give a company a much more realistic
and accurate picture of how the average service employee
performs on a day-to-day basis than will customer surveys
do.
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
Working With Service ANGELS
Service ANGELS mystery shopping programmes enable our
automotive clients to:
• Understand exactly what customer delight-driving behaviours look and sound
like
• Align company-wide focus on improving the customers’ experiences, resulting
in higher return rates
• Track and trend behaviours that correlate with guest delight to generate
actionable data proven to increase customer satisfaction
• Customize programmes to evaluate a variety of different customer touch
points, staffed positions, and scenarios
• Gain valuable, detailed insight into the customer experience through extensive
story-like narrative from our highly trained shoppers
• Discover if customers are receiving consistently superior customer service at
every location and/or customer touch point
• Identify gaps in training needs
• Ensure compliance with brand standards and policies
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
The Service ANGELS Process
How do we go about designing a customized Mystery Shopping
programme for your business?
• First, we spend time with you, our clients, understanding the nature of
your business, your service practices and standards.
• Then, together, we map out the objectives of the MS programme, design
the questionnaire and agree on the expected term of the programme.
• Service Angels then recruits, trains mystery shoppers and issues
assignments to them in accordance with the programme requirements.
• Service Angels collects the results, analyses the data and reports the
key findings to the client on an agreed basis- weekly, monthly, quarterly
basis etc.
• At the completion of the programme, Service Angels (together with the
client) assesses the success of the programme and decides either to
continue, re-design or end the programme.
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
Our Evaluation Tools
Our evaluation questionnaires basically have two basic parts.
First Part
• Consists of a series of Yes/No or rating scale questions that takes
the evaluator through all of the steps of the contact.
• A point value is attached to each of the questions and response,
so that points are totalled and tracked or compared from one
mystery shopper visit to the next.
•
Questions related to a phone contact, for instance, might
include: Was the telephone answered promptly and
professionally? Was the telephone answered in a friendly and
enthusiastic manner? Were all of your questions answered
accurately?
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
Second Part
•
It is basically a narrative section that provides a step-by-step narration
stating what happened to that evaluator either from the time they entered
a location to the time they left it or from the time they dialled the phone
number to the time they ended the conversation and hung up.
For the phone, an evaluation may look at:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
The number of rings before the phone is answered
The quality of the initial greeting
Whether the employee sounded cheerful or enthusiastic
Whether they were knowledgeable.
Did the employee express a genuine interest in the evaluator’s
questions and needs?
If the evaluator was put on hold, why were they put on hold and
for how long?
If the evaluator was transferred, was the person to whom they
were transferred able to answer their question or resolve their
issue?
If a follow-up call was promised, how prompt was the follow-up?
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
Our Assessment Reports Are Only
First Part of the Process
• Mystery shopper evaluations are only one part of the
process that makes a mystery shopper programme
successful.
• How companies use the evaluation reports is the other part.
• When you receive the weekly or monthly reports, you need
to sit down with the employees identified in the reports or
with all staff members to go over the results, and to go over
the step-by-step details to look for improvement
opportunities - areas where extra training or improved
communications might result in higher sales or greater
customer retention or loyalty.
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
Tying Rewards To Results
• We recommend that companies tie reward and
recognition into their mystery shopper
programmes.
• It can be a pat on the back and a round of
applause at a staff meeting or a small monetary
reward, that recognition makes the employee feel
good and the behaviour that you are rewarding
sets an example for the rest of the staff.
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
Focus On Positive Behaviours
• You will achieve greater results if you focus more on the positive
behaviours uncovered by mystery shopping programmes rather than
the negatives.
• You are going to uncover what is going wrong- however, if somebody
is not going to learn — you have given them chances and if their
reports keep coming in bad, and they are driving customers away —
then, yes, you have to handle that situation
• Negativity breeds negativity, and focusing exclusively on catching
people doing things wrong is only going to breed poor morale and
resistance to the programme.
• By focusing on the positive, and adding a reward element, however,
you create an opportunity to improve your customer service to the
point where no customer has a bad experience ever.
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
Our Mystery Shopping services are
not a Once-Off Programme
• It is important that once you start to use mystery
shopping as a customer service improvement tool, it is
necessary to keep the programme going for the long
term.
• You can scale it back, from weekly to monthly or monthly
to quarterly, once you have established it and you have
gotten your service quality up to a good level.
• But once you stop doing evaluations and you let that
recognition and positive reinforcement kind of slip, there
is a good chance that your customer service is going to
go back in the direction that it was in before you started.
.
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
Why Use Service ANGELS?
Why Work With Us
1. We customize surveys and reports to meet a client’s specific
objectives and needs.
2. We select shoppers according to your customer profile
3. Project specific training for shoppers
4. We rotate our shoppers
5. Data integrity from a geographically wide pool of shoppers
6. We offer emailed pdf’s of surveys/reports
7. We structure each new project with you
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
How Do l get Started?
To Request a Proposal, please contact us NOW!
Paget Kurwakumire
Managing Consultant
paget@mysteryshopper.co.zw
(+263) (0)777 412100
Loveson Chikwature
Business Development Consultant
loveson@mysteryshopper.co.zw
(+263) (0)776 444100
www.mysteryshopper.co.zw