There is a Harvard Business Review article entitled “The One Number You Need to Grow”. In it, the HBR teases us with the following nugget: “If growth is what you’re after, you won’t learn much from complex measurements of customer satisfaction or retention. You simply need to know what your customers tell their friends about you.”

The article’s author Frederick Reichheld tells the tale of a group of Fortune 500 executives at a customer service symposium swapping stories on what revs their customers’ engines and generates successful consumer loyalty. But CEO’s from high-profile brands like State Farm Insurance, Chick-a-Fil, Vanguard and others really pricked their ears up during a talk from Andy Taylor, the CEO of Enterprise Rent-a-Car, a talk that Reichheld describes as “riveting”.

According to Reichheld, Taylor and his senior team had figured out a way to measure and manage customer loyalty without the complexity of traditional customer surveys.

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A comprehensive mystery shopping program uses a combination of components that work synergistically to develop the vital data store managers need to effect change. One of those components is IVR (interactive voice response).

Unfortunately, some IVR vendors have chosen to position IVR surveys as a replacement for mystery shopping. This is erroneous, since these approaches provide different types of data, one based on subjective recollection and the other based on objective observation.

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As we’ve talked about before, the best users of mystery shopping programs offer additional methods to capture data that can be used to make necessary improvements. The reason why these different strategies work together to create such a comprehensive program is because they offer a variety of perspectives that, when combined, give great insight into the total customer experience. For the most part, mystery shopping programs look at the customer experience from the viewpoint of the customer and that of the store staff.

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Background

A woman’s apparel retailer was committed to the ideal that their associates should demonstrate an insatiable drive for anticipating and fulfilling customers’ desires. To implement this philosophy, the company wished to measure existing customer service, and the immediate impact that training has on associates’ behavior. As a sub- measurement, the company also wanted to evaluate whether implemented training held up over time.

The Question

Can one-time training be effective enough to bring about desired change, or must training be ongoing to support changes over time across stores and/or brands?

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In businesses that are constantly trying to attract and keep a faithful clientele measuring customer satisfaction has become a barometer for success. Understanding a customer’s experience in a store—whether it is a service station, food market, clothing store, or bookseller– in relation to satisfaction with the product, store, workers, and other elements, can be assessed via various tools. The common triumvirate of customer satisfaction indicators is composed of mystery shoppers, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Web surveys, and customer focus groups. Alone each of these tools offers a unique perspective on customer satisfaction. Taken and analyzed together they create a total picture of the customer experience.

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A long-held misconception exists that mystery shoppers supply businesses with information similar to that drawn from ordinary customer feedback. In fact, mystery shoppers provide a much different service, especially to those businesses aiming to be among the “best-in-class” within their industry. When used in combination with customer feedback, mystery shoppers are very powerful in helping businesses achieve their customer service objectives – which ultimately are responsible for driving revenue by keeping customers satisfied and wanting to return.

Customer feedback, typically obtained through customer feedback mechanisms, such as interactive voice response surveys (IVR), allows companies to define their own unique brand of customer services that answers the demands of their markets. Mystery shoppers, on the other hand, help to ensure the proper implementation of these customer service strategies through ongoing self-evaluation and troubleshooting. By taking an unbiased, qualitative measurement of a store’s operational habits, mystery shoppers can pinpoint which revenue-generating behaviors need to be reinforced with employees, allowing the company to respond accordingly – whether it is additional training, policy modification or even employee admonition.

For example, while a regular shopper can tell you whether or not their experience was pleasant, they are not likely to report how quickly the sales associate greeted, whether the sales associate suggested additional merchandise, and if the correct merchandise was displayed. Mystery shoppers are equipped with a pre-determined set of criteria from which to evaluate a store’s ability to execute its own unique customer service model. It is through mystery shopping that a company can find out exactly where it falls short and where it excels.

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