A Modern Day Customer Service Parable

Too often you hear stories about people’s customer service nightmares and commiserate with them as you talk of similar experiences. The Virgin Group founder Richard Branson recently shared a story about customer service himself, but the story ended with a satisfied customer and not a disgruntled one.

A Virgin Atlantic customer’s free limo failed to pick him up at his hotel (apparently the customer waited at the wrong door). So, he called a cab and arrived at the airport angry, running late and nervous he would miss his flight. A Virgin agent spotted him and tried to calm him down, apologized for the limo mix up and rushed him through the security staff lane to get him to his gate. She even reimbursed his taxi fare out of her own pocket. The passenger boarded the plane on time thanks to the Virgin agent’s ability to turn a negative customer experience into a positive one.

Unfortunately, when the agent later recounted this story to her supervisor and asked to be reimbursed for the $70 taxi fare, her supervisor asked if she had a receipt and refused to repay her without one. Branson pointed out that had any Virgin employees learned of the agent’s trouble with the supervisor, they would be unlikely to act in similar manners when other potential customer service issues arise. Agents would hesitate to steer from procedure to help customers if they knew their jobs would be at risk. That’s definitely not a good thing for Virgin’s customers, and therefore, not a good thing for Virgin.

Luckily, the airport manager heard about this story and intervened. He informed the finance team that he approved the reimbursement and educated the supervisor on the merits of “catching people doing something right.”

Branson writes, “Good customer service on the shop floor begins at the very top. If your senior people don’t get it, even the strongest links further down the line can become compromised, as the story shows.”

Train your employees well enough and instill faith in them that they can always act in a way where they’re “doing as they would be done by.” When your employees are happy, your customers are happy, and therefore, your company is happy as well.

Mystery Solved…If mystery shopping is so useful, why do retailers dislike it so much?

Mystery shopping is the best─no, make that the only-way retailers can get a truly objective view of the daily workings of their stores. When it’s done right, mystery shopping provides invaluable quantitative information about the customer experience that helps retailers optimize resources, motivate employees, and generally improve operations all around. Yet despite its potential value, mystery shopping is one of the most maligned metrics in the retail industry. How can this be?

The answer is simple. Mystery shopping is not a bad tool─it’s a tool that’s (all too often) used badly. There’s so much frustration out there resulting from poorly designed, badly maintained mystery shopping programs that the lousy reputation is no mystery at all. But to abandon mystery shopping because of a bad experience makes about as much sense as doing without a car because your last one happened to be a lemon.

How to make sure mystery shopping works for you

You spend a great deal of time and money designing customer service and product display protocols─elements that define your customer experience and provide crucial differentiation from your competition. A good mystery shopping program is the only way to get objective information about how well those carefully crafted strategies for service, display, and loss prevention are actually being implemented…and yet a bad mystery shopping program is almost sure to be a waste of time and money. How can you be sure you get a good one?

There’s no one answer to that question─just as there’s no one-size-fits-all mystery shopping program that can meet every company’s needs. However, the good news is that when mystery shopping programs are intelligently designed to meet a company’s specific needs, they are almost guaranteed to function beautifully. Working with an expert provider who can act as a true partner (not just a generic data-generating service) is the best way to ensure that you’ll get a customized program that’s right for you.

Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to help determine whether your mystery shopping program─and your provider─are working for you:

Do you know exactly what data you need? Your provider should be able to help you pinpoint precisely what you want to learn from your program, and then help you define those goals in measurable terms. In addition, they should be able to suggest ways to integrate the needs of your different departments into an overall plan that minimizes redundancy and creates a true company-wide perspective.

Is your mystery shopping audit routinely refreshed to reflect new concerns and new processes? A mystery shopping audit form shouldn’t be “frozen in time”. What needs to be monitored today will probably be substantially different from what needed to be observed yesterday. And, if a mystery shopping program is correctly indexed with other information tools (like a customer satisfaction program), insights from these tools ought to be suggesting new issues for your mystery shoppers to observe and objectively audit.

Are you correlating your data with other metrics? Mystery shopping programs provide an objective view on how your stores are working, while customer feedback provides a subjective view. Taken together, these metrics create a complete picture of the customer experience in your stores, and allow you to make concrete changes to meet or exceed your customers’ expectations. As a simple example, let’s say a customer survey indicates dissatisfaction with your stores’ restrooms. If your mystery shopping data indicates that the restrooms were clean and stocked with toilet paper at 100% of visits but that no paper towels were available at 50%, you can conclude that paper towel availability is an important part of your customers’ expectations. You can also give specific direction to your employees to fix the problem (i.e., “keep the restrooms well stocked with paper towels”) rather than providing more general direction (i.e., “maintain the restrooms better”) that might not get to the real problem.
Because correlating mystery shopping data with other metrics is so important, using a provider that can analyze and help implement a wide range of customer service evaluation metrics can provide a great advantage. When the same provider is designing and administrating, for example, your mystery shopping program and your customer exit interviews, both programs can be designed to mesh well and to be optimally useful in tandem.

Are you properly “mining” your shopping results for greatest insight? Getting good data is important, but even the best mystery shopping data is useless unless it’s put to practical use. A good mystery shopping provider should be able to show you ways to translate your findings into measurable improvements in your bottom line. After all, pinpointing problem areas is only helpful to the degree that it allows you instigate positive change. Remember that your standards for performance improvement can─and should─be high: if your front-line employees are following procedures correctly 90% of the time, that’s not good enough. Interactions with employees are a critical part of your brand, and hitting brand standards only 90% of the time isn’t acceptable. (Just to put things into perspective: imagine if your company logo were printed in the right colors only 90% of the time!)

The bottom line has to be your bottom line

Simply put, a mystery shopping program is only as good as the data it produces─and the data is only good to the degree that it helps you make improvements to your business that impact your bottom line. Unfortunately, too many mystery shopping programs fail to produce good, usable data, and frustration is the inevitable result. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Good mystery shopping programs do exist, and choosing an expert mystery shopping provider─one who can truly be your partner in planning and execution─is your best guarantee of getting one.

Not Just A Customer Service Tool

Optimizing your customers experience program should be considered a revenue source. You could categorize it as a customer service tool, but research shows satisfied customers impact sales. One of the best strategies is to look for way to improve sales, within your customer experience program.

On company Orvis, has extended their online customer service hours. Brad Wolansky, VP of global e-commerce shared with Brandweek how his company views the CRM tools:
“Yeah, we do plenty of customer service and it’s a terrific way of solving customer service issues. But from a business model standpoint, it’s a sales conversion tool. When properly managed—and I underline ‘properly managed—a chat program is a money-making effort that should not be viewed as a customer service cost.”

It’s interesting how Wolansky views part a traditional customer service tool as revenue making action. How many of us dismiss or cut back on customer experience programs because we fail to see the potential sales from it? In fact, companies who deeply invest and utilize their customer service tools are some of the most successful. We can think of Zappos and their success as a leading example.

The key is to manage it as a sales tool versus just a customer service tool. Every interaction with the customer is an opportunity to strengthen your brand and deepen the connection with your customer. Look around at how your promotions are handled, how much product knowledge your sales associates offer, and discover the niches where you can improve both customer experience and sales.

A TALE OF TWO BURGERS

No doubt you’ve had the experience of traveling along the highway with a rumbling stomach when, all of a sudden, there’s a billboard advertising a juicy, mouthwatering, cheesy hamburger, available within seconds at the fast food joint only one short exit away. Agreeing with your stomach that it sure looks good, you speed up a bit to get there faster, dreaming of splashing it all down with a cold drink.

But as you get ready to devour your meal-in-a-box, reality hits. This burger looks nothing like the picture. In fact, it looks more like a two-year-old slapped it together from pieces of other burgers. You, my friend, have just experienced one of the underlying themes shoppers complain about most often: a disconnect between a brand’s image and the actual customer experience.

Read more…

Customers Frustrated With Mobile Buying Experience

Studies conducted by J.D. Power and Associates, mentioned in Marketing Daily, show that overall customer satisfaction with the wireless retail sales experiences has steadily decreased since 2006 and has reached its lowest level since 2005. Power’s measured overall customer satisfaction based on four factors: sales staff, store display, store facility, and price/promotion. Approximately 51% of those surveyed said sales staff was the most important factor of overall customer satisfaction. Those surveyed felt that sales associates did not posses enough knowledge about the products being offered.

With highly technical products, customers look to sales associates for guidance and recommendations therefore it is extremely important in the wireless retail industry for sales associates to stay up to date with product offerings.

Midpriced Retailers Want A Piece of The Luxury Market

Ann Taylor, J. Crew, and Gap are introducing luxury items to boost their profits. Banana Republic is launching a new upscale line called BR Monogram while J. Crew will start to offer limited-edition products such as a $3,000 jacket. How risky are these new upscale collections?

Losing Loyal Customers

These retailers run the risk of losing current loyal customers. Loyal customers might feel that they cannot relate to this “upscale” image and will have no desire to purchase upscale items. Loyal customers could be turned off by this move and might altogether stop shopping at the retail store.

Difficulty Gaining New Customers

Retailers also run the risk of not gaining any new customers. For customers with higher price points, they have other high end retail store options.

Slow Economy
The third risk for these three major retailers is launching new lines during an economic downturn. Monthly same-store sales for March have been the worst in 13 years. Many retailers are struggling to turn a profit with their main businesses. Ann Taylor, J. Crew, and Gap will not only have to focus on their main businesses but they will have to allocate extra resources such as marketing dollars to make sure their new lines have a shot at success.

The Upside

The luxury tier of fashion has been outperforming midpriced retailers for the last several years. Perhaps now is truly the best time to launch an upscale line.

Strategic Uses of Mystery Shopping

When considering all of the valuable ways to strategically use mystery shopping to build brand loyalty among your customer base, evaluating the effect of additional staffing on service levels and sales is the first thing to come to mind.

Let’s peek in on a familiar scenario to see how one top retailer handled this need:

A well-known women’s retailer wanted to test the effect of adding additional payroll hours on service levels and sales. They focused their attention on the fitting room area, as that was a prime opportunity for up selling their customers. The additional payroll dollars allowed a dedicated associate to assist in the fitting room at all times.

Read more…

Are you Exposing Yourself? (Part 1)

Sounds obscene, doesn’t it? Well, forgive the play on words, but now that we have your attention….

For most retailers, the holiday period presents a sizeable increase in store traffic and sales volume. Retailers have their greatest opportunity to provide superior customer service during the holiday season, yet many retailers put the brakes on their mystery shopping program during this time when their sales are the greatest. Does that make any sense? This is the time when retailers need mystery shopping programs most! What would one additional item per purchase be worth to your bottom line?

Companies can use mystery shopping to their advantage to help maximize sales during this crucial period. Here’s a plan for retailers to consider:

- Discuss with store managers customer service expectations during the holiday season
- Solicit your store managers for input in the development of a “holiday” survey
- Scale down your survey to focus on key selling behaviors only
- Ensure that the new survey maintains corporate objectives, achievable by store personnel

Your organization has worked too hard to ignore monitoring and measuring during this key time of year.