In the office supply category, these three placed one, two and three respectively: Staples, Office Depot and Office Max. While all the stores scored well on welcoming and thanking customers, their friendliness didn’t translate into the aisles, making suggestions and increasing sales.

While our Mystery Shoppers rated them fairly high on service, they rated them low on making sales. Employees are friendly and helpful, but they don’t do well when it comes to suggesting what else customers might buy or pointing out items on sale or potential discounts.

A bit more emphasis on selling could go a long way toward a more profitable holiday season – exceeding expectations of what is expected to a better year over all. The customer experience is positive and we believe that means they’re open to hearing what the people who know most about the products think would make most sense for them to buy. It’s simple and it enhances the customer experience.

When done right, Mystery Shopping is a tremendous asset for retailers. Results can be used right away to improve the customer experience and to motivate employees, optimize resources and improve operations in every way. Sound big? It is. Mystery shopping is observational research at the business level and like any research, you have to know what data needs to be gathered and how to best interpret and use it. Without these metrics in place and properly carried out, the value is questionable. And like most things, something done poorly is usually worse than not doing it at all.

Mystery Shopping Gets Answers to the Questions You Need to be Asking

How do you measure what happens in your stores? How do you know which factors influence your customer’s experiences and perceptions and affect your sales? It’s impossible to know without objective ‘feet on the ground’. Experienced providers employ mystery shoppers who are carefully trained and who make observations that when analyzed will give you a view of your stores you just can’t get in any other way.

Can Mystery Shopping Really Improve Your Business?

When you work with a seasoned provider, here’s what it looks like start to finish: Together you pinpoint exactly what you need to learn from your program. Define your goals in measurable terms and know what determines a valid statistical sample – how many stores, how many employees, what metrics you need to put in place for your situation. Create the questions, get them asked and answered. Interpret the data and translate it into the actionable steps that lead to improvement. It’s important that the provider understand the needs of the company across departments so you can work together to create a plan that provides a useful company-wide perspective, minimizing redundancy and eliminating the waste that comes from repeated effort.

Mystery Shopping Works Nationally

When a national cinema wanted to measure the effectiveness of their training and improve customer satisfaction, they needed to know how employees were performing at locations around the country. They required accurate data and they wanted it quickly. They were looking for a provider who could partner with them to assist with every part of the process. They had failed before and they knew they needed someone to help them establish goals, create a program and help them analyze the mystery shop and put the data to use. Choosing the right provider resulted in a mystery shopping program that improved customer experience.

Mystery Shopping Works Regionally

A regional chocolate retailer was experiencing rapid growth. They had a mystery shopping program in place, but they were so busy managing growth that they had no time to analyze data or make use of it. Their solution was finding a provider that worked with them throughout the entire process. They had help not just establishing and implementing the program, but assistance where they needed it most: analyzing data and determining what actions to take. The process worked smoothly and they were able to make improvements that kept customer satisfaction high, keep pace with their growth and improve their business (instead of imploding it).

Don’t Suffer from Being Information Rich and Execution Poor

Experienced providers work with you to understand your needs and customize a mystery shop that addresses the issues and concerns you have right in that moment. You get information that is real and relevant. Your business is a dynamic entity and what was critical to your company yesterday may not be what needs to be measured tomorrow. A good mystery shop will naturally suggest new issues to audit and improve.

Asking the Right Questions is Critical

Interpreting and using the information generated by the mystery shop is where the rubber meets the road. Too often, even when great data is mined from a mystery shopping program, the retailer is left with information they don’t take action on. That’s why experienced providers keep working after the shops are completed. They show you how to interpret the data and they deliver reports you can understand. They work with you to determine exactly what actions you need to take to make the improvements suggested by the mystery shopping program.

Learn to Love it

Understand the true value of the most objective retail tool available, work with a quality provider to get it right and you’ll learn to love and benefit from the tool that everyone else loves to hate. You’ll have more satisfied customers and a stronger bottom line as a result.

1. Conducting an RFP
In this case, the company turns over the job of choosing a provider to purchasing. Why not? They buy supplies, negotiate deals, handle vendors. But this is different. Purchasing does not have the necessary background and understanding of the mystery shopping process to take on this task. Your mystery shopping program, when done correctly, will literally touch every person in your organization AND your customers. This isn’t the same as purchasing pens in bulk or negotiating a maintenance contract. Most programs with high turnover rates are ones in which RFP’s are involved. Bottom line? Some things are just too important to leave to an RFP”¦your mystery shopping program is one of them.

2. Going with the lowest price
As the saying goes, “the cheapest option is the most expensive.” Check for hidden costs, upfront fees and changes to reports and management structure. Sometimes, the lowest cost alternative will end up costing more in money and headaches than you ever imagined.

3. Over Emphasis on Reporting Capabilities
Great reports are nice, but all of that pretty data means nothing if it is not “good data.” Do not be fooled by fancy reporting. What really counts is data integrity and a provider that not only collects that data correctly, but can show you how to apply it to achieve the improvements you’re going for.

4. Being wowed by claims of hundreds of thousands of shoppers.
As is true in other areas of life, it is quality, not quantity that counts. Hundreds of thousands of shoppers can sound impressive, but it doesn’t speak to how those customers feel about your products and services and what kinds of interactions are taking place with your frontline staff.

Hot tip: Your mystery shopping provider should be able to cover all primary, secondary and tertiary areas with qualified shoppers. Additionally, they should have a process in place for tracking shopper performance, and should be able to tell you about each shopper’s talent for adhering to stated guidelines.

5. Not checking ALL references
Will your potential provider allow you to call other clients besides the ones they offer as references? If not, this is something serious to consider. What are they hiding?
When speaking with the provider’s clients, find out how long they’ve been with that provider. Big retail names may have an influence on you, but a long-standing, loyal client list is far more impressive. Any provider can pull it together long enough to build a short term client list.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If your store’s brand doesn’t match your typical customer’s experience, get on the phone to HR right now. You may not have much time to undo the damage that’s been done. While many customers will put up with an occasional snafu in service or expectations, consistently disconnecting from your brand with bad customer service and substandard products will kill interest in your product. When this happens, your only hope is to prioritize the training and monitoring of your frontline staff to revive public interest and match your service and product with those pretty pictures in your advertisements.

True, customers are fickle. One day they want you to leave them alone to wander the store, and the next day they complain no one is helping them. But the bottom line is, customers who consistently have poor experiences will look for someplace else to shop. And they tell their friends. No retailer wants to suffer bad word-of-mouth. The Internet has made it all too easy to turn the tide of a brand’s popularity with a few truthful, albeit wicked, stories in a very short amount of time.

Retailers must be seriously supportive of ongoing training and coaching for sales associates based upon the principles of excellence in service. This is the only true competitive advantage in an industry where your brand may sink or swim based on public opinion. Companies who seek assistance in developing and maintaining strong training and coaching programs often need a comprehensive mystery shopping program to cultivate the strong frontline staff that drives sales, and provides managers and store owners with the ongoing, meaningful data necessary to maintain and continue to build on those increases in both sales and customer loyalty.

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.

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.

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.

In order to evaluate the impact on service levels, the stores were mystery shopped every week. A modified version of the client’s standard retail shop was created with a number of additional fitting room related questions.

The weekly shops were alternated as follows:

-One week the shop occurred during the up staffing period
-The following week the shop occurred when no up staffing was in place

The expectation was that the service scores would be compared over a six-month period, combined with sales analysis versus last year.

Without this retailer’s attention to studying this issue, both growth and dollars could have been significantly delayed. Honing in on exactly what needed to be measured, then designing a program to effectively measure the data helped this retailer stamp their name on service and quality for thousands of loyal customers.

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.