How actively do your sales associates conduct follow-through selling? Mystery shopping can help you objectively assess compliance with selling guidelines, utilizing trained shoppers to visit your stores and observe how guidelines are followed. Shoppers are sent into your stores with a list of observables (cleanliness of the store, attitude of the sales associates, etc.) and a list of actions (approached by an associate, had additional merchandise suggested, etc.). After shopping your store, these professionals accurately document their experience and the extent to which they saw each observable and received each action.

Increase Sales By Improving the Customer Experience

Sales strategies and selling themes developed at the corporate level are often not executed at the store level. Most chain executives are so busy and immersed in their jobs that they fail to objectively audit the real customer experience delivered at the store. Sometimes headquarters personnel do not have enough time to conduct store visits and, if they do, it is rare that they actually experience a visit the same way customers do. It is astounding how little most retailers spend on measuring and managing how customers really feel while shopping in their stores.

How Does It Feel To Be Your Customer?
Customer satisfaction surveys provide an accurate view of the customer’s perspective. Satisfaction surveys are conducted by interviewing a sample of your customers to determine their perceptions of your stores and sales associates. Rather than compliance (mystery shopping’s realm) customer satisfaction identifies perceptions – how your customer feels.

The result of a properly conducted and implemented customer satisfaction program is a store-level action plan defining the key drivers of your business – what most needs to be improved to increase your sales.

And that’s how you define the true customer experience.

For those of you who are health care professionals, the ebb and flow of patients is just part of a typical workday in health care. Today, however, your ‘patient’ is just as likely to be a mystery shopper, sent to evaluate how your office, and you in particular, deliver routine care.

A recent Wall Street Journal article stated, “The health-care industry has never been noted for its customer service. But as competition builds amid efforts to encourage patients to comparison-shop for health care, medical facilities and hospitals are increasingly looking for ways to improve the patient experience. Some are turning to mystery-shopping services — a mainstay of the retail and hotel industries — which send employees to pose as customers and later report back on how they were treated.”

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Clarifying employee expectations and creating reward and incentive schemes go hand in hand with increased sales. That’s what measuring company progress can do for you. But it’s “how” companies are deploying performance measurement programs that is changing the business landscape today.

Historically, gauging consumer “experiences” has been the primary responsibility of the customer service department.

But in my experience, customer service departments have become little more complaint departments. Or even worse, a place to go for customers to go and replace unwanted merchandise. Let’s face it, you can’t use the current customer service department model as a way to gauge the health and vibrancy of your company’s customer relationships – it’s an outmoded model that is spread too thin in terms of responsibilities and is not advanced enough to handle all the measurements that need addressing across the company.

Enter the mystery shopper.

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Financial institutions wishing to ensure compliance with new industry regulations are partly responsible for the growth of the mystery shopping industry. As more regulations are implemented, evaluating employee performance is quickly taking a back seat to regulatory compliance as the most important reason for implementing mystery shopping programs. In fact, three new trends seem to be emerging.

1) Online mystery shopping will continue to grow as more customers access financial products and services via the Internet. A secure and easily navigatable web site is crucial. Comprehensive product and service descriptions, and ease of interacting with bank representatives is also vital to ensure the optimum online customer experience.

2) As use of mystery shopping programs grows, there may be some unexpected benefits. For example, professional mystery shoppers sent to evaluate a company’s regulatory compliance may uncover problems in employee behavior or store operations. This allows others departments, such as sales and marketing, to benefit from the mystery shopping program, even though that wasn’t the plan.

3) Expect the number and variety of organizations using mystery shopping programs to increase, as mystery shopping moves from the expected retail sector to financial institutions, health care, and other less traditional organizations.

Today’s savvy financial organizations use mystery shopping to gather competitive intelligence. Federal regulators, third-party suppliers and watchdogs use mystery shopping to verify bank branches are selling their financial products properly. As the pressure of competition increases globally for all kinds of companies, mystery shopping will continue to be the best way to find out what you really need to know to continue to compete.

In good times and bad, retailers’ sales are related to several basic conditions:
• Store locations
• Merchandise offered
• Inventory
• Proximity to competition
• Staffing

Beyond these basics are three additional, service-oriented ways to improve sales:

1. Increasing Conversions
Typically, 82 out of 100 people who walk into a store leave without making a single purchase. That’s a retail conversion rate of only 18%. While this is a statistic begging for understanding, in harder economic times it makes even more sense to know why shoppers leave your stores without making a purchase.

ICC Decision Services offers a sales calculator that easily helps you determine the lift in sales you would receive from an incremental improvement in your conversion rate. As an example, increasing conversion from the benchmark 18% to 25% results in a yearly additional $115K in sales per store! Contact ICC Decision Services to obtain this valuable calculator.

2. Understanding Why Shoppers Leave Without Purchasing
Now we know 82 out of 100 people leave your store without purchasing. But do we know why? Consider conducting customer exit interviews in select locations to uncover the reasons. Exit interviews are conducted on premise, just as customers leave your stores. Trained interviewers intercept these customers, asking them a series of questions that explore exactly why they did not make a purchase. Exit interviews often dispel intuitive explanations. For example, one, big-box retailer discovered they were losing sales not because of inventory outages, but because shoppers could not find the merchandise they wanted.

3. Improve Suggestive Selling To Increase Sales
Our studies show that improving suggestive selling can increase the bottom-line by millions. To effectively increase suggestive selling, provide sales staff with real reasons customers should buy your merchandise, helping staff to reinforce the customer’s decision process.

Of course, you need assurance that sales associates are following through with each and every customer. You can further expand your suggestive sales programs by increasing sales through accessories and related products. Obviously, the more merchandise the customer is exposed to, the greater the likelihood that they will buy something. This means active selling, not passive assistance. Sales associates need to be reminded to actively sell and need motivation follow through.

At the end of the day, mystery shopping reports may not be worth more than the paper they are printed on to the district and regional managers. The data should have the greatest impact on the front lines.

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Most customers who have unsatisfactory experiences will not complain…they will just never come back.Shopping programs can identify areas of training that need improvement and can identify areas of training that are working particularly well.

As I’ve mentioned, mystery shopping is beset by myths and mischaracterizations that lead many companies to draw inaccurate conclusions on what mystery shopping is and what benefits it can provide for them.

But in my view, if you’re not using a mystery shopping program – or if you’re not using the one you have to full advantage – you could overlooking a powerful competitive weapon.

Think about your last restaurant meal. Chances are you remember what you ate, who you were with and whether or not your server was pleasant. And if your service was slow or less than satisfactory, you’ll probably remember that, too. (In most instances, people remember bad customer service more than good customer service.)

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Good businesses are always measuring progress - - sometimes in the unlikeliest instances. Years ago, retail magnate Marshall Field was walking through the original store that bears his name in Chicago. In doing so, he overheard a clerk arguing with a customer.

He stopped and asked: “What are you doing?”

The clerk answered: “I’m settling a complaint.”

Field shot back: “No, you’re not. Give the lady what she wants.”

Marshall Field, a notorious “floorwalker” at his landmark store, was way ahead of his time. He knew that giving customers “what they want” is the heart and soul of any commercial enterprise. He also knew that the key to boosting both his company brand and his bottom line was by constantly measuring progress, not just as a customer service barometer, although that’s obviously critical to any company’s success.

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