Pret A Manger

“My name is Evan Georges. I am the Manager at this Pret Shop.”

“My team and I meet every morning. We discuss the points you’ve raised, the good, the bad and the ugly. If we can deal wit it ourselves, we will. If we can’t, I’ll forward this card to Martin Bates, our president. I know he’ll do what he can. Either way, thanks.”

I guarantee few issues end up in Mr Bates office. The reason is simple…the stores are empowered to take care of the customer. Further, and perhaps most importantly they have clearly communicated this to their customers. BTW…As a customer, I had an excellent experience today. No surprise.

New York, NY — ICC/Decison Services’ latest in iPhone applications shows retailers the dollar value resulting from increasing their conversion rates. ConversionCalc™ is the second of its iPhone applications available for free download on iTunes. ICC’s existing application, the UpSellCall™, was the first of its kind in the industry when it was launched this past summer. ICC/Decison Services is an international customer experience management company based in New York City.

Field management loves our calculators because they are portable and easily show store management the power of associate behavior. “We received great feedback on the UpSell Calc, our first application,” says David Rich, President/CEO of ICC/Decision Services. “Field management loves our calculators because they are portable and easily show store management the power of associate behavior. Corporate loves them because they point to increased revenue. It takes so much to get customers in the door in today’s marketplace,” continues Rich, “but many retailers don’t realize that increasing your conversion rates by only 2% can increase revenue by 10%. The ConversionCalc™ will quantify that lost opportunity for retailers and can produce calculations for a single store, district or the entire retail chain.”

Other features of the ConversionCalc™ include: easy one-screen operation; allows calculations over multiple time periods (days, months, quarters, etc); reveals the true dollar amount for increased associate performance.

Click here for more “ConversionCalc” conversion rates information, iPhone applications and download links.

About ICC/Decision Services
ICC/Decision Services was founded in 1979 to design and execute Customer Experience Management programs. ICC/Decision Services offers a wide range of qualitative and quantitative business tools, including mystery shopping, shopper intercepts, iPhone applications, conversion rates tools, customer satisfaction and employee engagement. Clients include Coach, L.L. Bean, Rite Aid, 7-11, Foot Locker, CVS, Walmart and others. The company is headquartered at 122 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001, U.S.A. Phone: (800) 444-1717. More information is available at www.iccds.com.

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In this Progressive Grocer story, retailers are given 10 tips to help improve the retail shopping experience with some good old-fashioned cheer. It appears that strong sales incentives are required as part of the mix to drive the consumer toward a purchase. Almost one third of all purchases of CPG goods are driven by some kind of a deal. It is also reported that traffic at on-line coupon and reward sites are at an all time high. A few fairly common sense tactics can address the consumers need for an incentive and bring the spirit of the Holidays to the store. Here is that list in so many words:

1. More in-store tasting and cooking demos.
2. Aromatherapy.
3. Use local school bands or choirs to provide festive music.
4. Collect food bank donations.
5. Run holiday classic movie and TV shows on in-store media.
6. Offer holiday prize drawings for faithful customers.
7. Make donations to local charities. Encourage suppliers to do the same.
8. Holiday decorations.
9. Make sure your staff wears a smile and offers a greeting.
10. Keep the staff happy by allowing them to enjoy the Holidays as well.

It appears the mystery to consumer behavior in late 2009 and beyond is finding the right mix of tangible deals and incentives and mixing them with a store that provides a pleasant shopping environment. This savings/service cocktail can make a tasty cup of Holiday cheer.

That seems to be the theme of a blog authored by Bruce Tempkin on Customer Experience Matters. In it, Tempkin puts out his wish list for customer service in 2010. Here are his five wishes and some explanation:

“Forget about average handle times.” Focus more on delighting the customer rather than getting them off the line. Fast handle times often represent inattentive agents, not a quick and effective problem solution.

“Learn from every interaction.” Every chance you get to speak to your consumer is an opportunity to lean about their needs and how you can meet them. This is perhaps the most valuable kind of consumer research that you can acquire.

“Recover quickly and be proactive.” Even a good solution that is drawn-out or difficult can still lose a customer. A sense of urgency will always create goodwill and eliminating problems on the front end is even more effective. Many companies are finding great value in allowing customers to talk and help each other.

“Make customer service a product attribute.” When we design and develop new products, one of the first things we do is make a list of product attributes. This is the time to build in customer service, “as a key component of your offering.”

“Engage reps in customer experience transformation.” Transforming the customer experience is largely dependent on transforming your employees’ experience. The attitudes and experience of an empowered customer service staff are directly reflected upon the customer. If they enjoy their jobs, they will enjoy helping people as an end result, not just simply handling x number of calls.

Service metrics are important, but they are only a snap shot of the real job at hand. When choosing or designing any customer experience touch point, place the emphasis on delighting the customer, and everything else will fall into place.

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.

Although all companies have some type of Customer Service Department and some have adopted customer experience programs to measure and react to the data, most do not have an integrated approach to apply the learning across the organization and back into the marketplace. What gets in the way of integration? If customer programs are used at all, they are used and isolated within organizational silos. See if this sounds familiar. Marketing owns the Customer Satisfaction Survey, Operations owns the Mystery Shop Program, Market Research owns the Customer Intercepts and Human Resources owns the Employee Engagement Program. But who owns the customer relationship?

The reality is that marketers don’t do this with any other asset in their company. The COO makes sure that the widget is the sole focus of the company from raw material to distribution. The CFO makes sure that every bean is counted along that path and knows exactly what the effect of a bean spent in Silo One means to Silo Four. Perhaps it is time to introduce the CCO, the Chief Customer Officer.

Don’t laugh. We have a high ranking executive to champion every other asset in the company, but we don’t have one whose sole purpose is to look out for the, “most important asset.” Companies are already moving quickly into the area of Social Media and you will soon see the advent of the Chief Community Officer, so the development of this new C-suite position makes sense and should not be out of the realm of possibility.

If the customer is truly your company’s greatest asset, then stewarding that relationship has to be more than lip service. The customer experience has to have a seat in the board room and filter its way all the way through the organization as an integrated strategy focus. Now that would be walking the walk.

Retailers, restaurants, financial institutions and brands deal too often in numbers and percentages when dollars are what really matter. In just a few simple steps, the “UpSellCalc ™” takes current suggestive selling numbers for a corporation and calculates the dollar value of the upsell on the sales floor, in the fitting rooms and at the register. Taking it one step further, UpSellCalc ™ will also calculate the dollar value should the frequency of suggestive selling increase by 5, 10 or even 20 percent. Other features of the UpSellCalc ™ include: easy one-screen operation, ability to calculate ROI for a specific store, district, region or across an entire retail chain, and key indicators of the true dollar amount for increased associate performance.

“Mobile technology is playing an increasing role in the retail and brand experience every day,” says David Rich, President/CEO of ICC/Decision Services. “At ICC, we believe first and foremost in showing our customers a return on investment, and with the UpSellCalc ™ we have developed yet another tool for delivering this information to them–in this case right into the palm of their hands. We look forward to introducing several other new tools in the mobile technology and social media arenas in the coming months.”

Click here for more “UpSellCalc” information and download links.

ABOUT ICC/DECISION SERVICES
ICC/Decision Services was founded in 1979 to design and execute Customer Experience Management programs. ICC/Decision Services offers a wide range of qualitative and quantitative business tools, including mystery shopping, shopper intercepts, customer satisfaction and employee engagement. Clients include Coach, L.L. Bean, Rite Aid, 7-11, Foot Locker, Walmart and others. The company is headquartered at 122 West 27th Street, New York, NY 10001, U.S.A. Phone: (800) 444-1717. More information is available at www.iccds.com.

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Mystery shopping programs provide insight into both great service and substandard service. Newt Barrett wrote an excellent article on how Five Guys Burgers and Fries uses secret shopping in its customer experience program. Barrett reveals the restaurant uses mystery shoppers to pinpoint staff members who excel at serving the customer. He claims the biggest effect is in how management leverages the secret shopping report into an incentive program for employees.

Five Guys Burgers and Fries is an example of how to use mystery shoppers for brand and service management by determining specific company goals and then creating a program that directly supports it. Whether it’s finding areas of improvement, pinpointing the outstanding staff, or measuring the effectiveness of brand promotions, mystery shopping is a versatile customer experience tool. If you are looking to maintain consistent standards of customer experience, the success of Five Guys Burgers and Fries indicates the value of smart implementation of a secret shopping program.

Many companies term Quality Assurance in different names, but the underlying ideas are more or less similar in every case.

Quality Assurance and the Service Industry:

Although quality assurance is critical in both service and manufacturing industries, the weight of Quality Assurance is emphasized higher in the service industry. Why? The answer lies in the main distinction between service and product, which is the intangibility of services. The contact between the consumer and the producer is higher in service marketing, which asks for more careful execution of quality assurance measures.

Also, the competition is fiercely growing in the service market, meaning companies need to focus and improve their quality promises.

Implementing quality assurance in service industry:

Identifying the parameters to ensure quality in the service market is not that easy, and most of the time the parameters differ from provider to provider. However, the following steps could be applicable as general approaches towards quality assurance in case of any service provider. These approaches have been defined as the DMAIC approaches as well. DMAIC stands for: Defining, Measurement, Analyzing, Improvement and Controlling.

Identification of customer expectation:
A successful marketing approach starts with the identification of the target market and their needs. While in quality assurance the company has to set a standard for service offerings, first they have to identify the expectation of the market. Any standard bar set below the level of market expectation will not suffice.

Market research, customer surveys, feedback forms, secret shoppers, mystery shopping programs — these are the tools to help identify customer expectations.

Determination of standards:
While determining the standards, the ceiling is set by the mission and vision of the company whereas the floor is set by the market expectation. This means the standard of quality promise has to be set keeping the mission and vision of the company and can never be set below the market expectation. A company or service entity must provide their basic services at the least, like: in case of any restaurant the least promise they can make for quality maintenance is to provide clean food. Customer surveys sometimes help in determination of standards, as do secret shopper or mystery shopper programs.

Measurement of performance:
Then the existing performance standard has to be measured and matched with the adopted standard in order to figure out the differences between them.

Analyzing:
Now, when the gaps between the standard and the current performance have been determined, the reasons giving in to the gaps should be analyzed. The analysis has to be thorough, extensive and reflective of the market scenario. This is why in most of the companies; they delegate the duty to a separate unit called Quality Assurance.

Planning:
After, the causes and effects of the gaps have been analyzed; proper plan should be made in order to overcome these. Management can form different teams in order to plan for the best possible strategy for quality assurance.

Controlling:
Without constant performance up to the standard, there is actually no point in implementing any strategy. To ensure this consistency- proper control over the process is to be exercised.

By following the aforementioned steps, quality assurance can be given to customers, which will eventually lead to a higher customer retention.

There are many factors that work together to make a mystery shopping program successful. However, no matter how much support your program receives from management, it will not be sustainable, consistent and successful without the full participation of your frontline staff.

Mystery shopping has taken a bad rap throughout the years. While savvy management may recognize its value, store associates are likely to consider mystery shopping as a way for management to spy on their daily activities, to find fault and criticize. This is due partly to the fact that mystery shopping programs have often been incorrectly implemented and the data from those programs has been incorrectly used.

Mystery shopping programs are not implemented merely to point the finger, but to look for excellence and reward that behavior. When used properly, mystery shopping is positive reinforcement at its best, and there is nothing like positive reinforcement to boost morale and create a happy workforce that gets the job done in the spirit of teamwork.

Of course, your mystery shopping program may uncover weak areas of your operation. This is to be expected. But any weak areas uncovered are simply opportunities to correct the problems and further strengthen your brand, your frontline staff, and your customer base.

Let’s look at several ways you can create interest in your mystery shopping program and keep your staff excited about participating to their best abilities:

First, and possibly most important, is providing individual and team motivation through recognition of excellence. How? Here’s a few ways:

• Instant (non-monetary) rewards by shopper to employee
• Shopper meets with store manager who then rewards employee
• Associate of the month, quarter, etc., (including picture in internal newspaper or similar recognition)
• Team of the month, district, region etc.
• Post survey in store to reinforce importance
• Post “blown up” shop results in store
• Reward top performance
• Reward most improved performance, store team, district, region
• Contests based upon performance i.e. suggestion selling

Next, you might want to try changing your research methods. For example:

• Change your survey questions…ask new questions, change the words, change the order of the questions
• Focus on a limited number of behaviors that are reinforced
• Set up program so managers and associates can succeed
• Give associates chance to perform using scenario-driven Mystery Shop
• Constantly analyze data and provide continuous feedback

Another area where you can make changes that will create excitement for the program and sustain interest in participating fully is through your Program Management objectives. Consider these possibilities:

• Define clear objectives
• Keep it simple
• Hire a vendor that can be a partner
• Obtain buy-in from front line
• Provide adequate internal administration
• Plan for change

And finally, the way you deliver the data compiled from your mystery shopping program can be instrumental in the program’s success. Your deliverables should be provided to store managers on a timely and consistent basis, so that managers can become accustomed to using the data to improve behaviors over time. In this way, managers will feel ‘in control’ of the store environment and can pass that confidence on to frontline staff. Once the staff begins to see the improvements to the store and the positive effect on customers, and feels the pride of individual recognition, your mystery shopping program will have become a true success: a program that created enough interest to get everyone excited, and now sustains that interest based on its own success.

Why is this important? Research shows that 97% of customers who have had a bad customer service experience do not complain vocally. No, they voice their opinion in a way that has much more dramatic impact: they simply don’t come back.

One of our clients, New York and Company (with a successful chain of 470 women’s apparel stores), has said their definition of great service is that the central office never receives a customer complaint. Does this sound like they are ignoring potential problems? They’re not. In reality, they do believe there will be issues. However, they have chosen to face those issues proactively. They are building the kind of PROACTIVE organization I talk about by empowering the store manager to identify and react to issues at the individual store level before or as the incident occurs…..pretty amazing. Of course, this billion-dollar organization realizes this commitment to a proactive attitude will take time to implement. That is why they have been consistently applying proactive principles for over 3 years. They are not yet where they want to be, but they have shown DOUBLE digit improvements in their service metrics. And while they may enjoy this growth and improvement so much that they may never be satisfied with the status quo, they are realistic in understanding that change wouldn’t happen overnight, or for that matter in a quarter or even a year.

There are 4 Myths in Mystery Shopping:

#1 Scores are ALWAYS Going Up

When a mystery shopping program is introduced, scores do tend to shoot up rapidly. However, over time, they tend to flatten out. Upper management may then assume the program is no longer working properly. The opposite is actually the truth, and here’s why. Looking back and recognizing the progress that has been made is more important than looking forward. Understanding that mystery shopping serves as a guideline for your store associates to understand and to reinforce the behaviors they should be using every day is essential. When a store no longer emphasizes these behaviors, positive reinforcement for the new behaviors ceases. Associates usually return to previous behaviors, since this is human nature.

We’ve had cases where the mystery shopping program was stopped and we went back one, two, or three months later to measure scores, only to find they had gone down. It is important to remember that the program emphasizes behaviors congruent with what is important to the business. Just because the numbers aren’t going up as dramatically as in the beginning of the program, does not mean the program is failing.

Rather than pointing the finger at the program, this is the perfect time to freshen up the surveys and focus on other areas that drive revenue and the brand.

#2 Shops are Perfect

We wish they were! With any market tool including mystery shopping, there’s always some degree of error. Even the Gallup polls state in the fine print that the results of their surveys are + or – 5%. As a mystery shopping company, we shoot for less than a 1% error margin, so essentially less than 1% of the shops we perform are challenged. If those numbers rise to 2 -3%, the program will meet with credibility issues from the client.

Perhaps the problem is not the question itself, but that the question is not being asked correctly. Perhaps the shoppers don’t understand the question, or the stores don’t understand the expected behaviors.

Shops will never be perfect. There’s always a margin of error, but what is important is to focus on the potential for improvement.

#3 All Employees Love Getting Mystery Shopped

The ones getting good scores sure do! But there is a perception that mystery shoppers are there to find all of the hidden flaws, and this is far from the truth. The best mystery shopping programs find and reward the good behaviors that lead to positive outcomes for the client.

Still, America seems overly focused on the negative. A 2005 Department of Labor survey revealed that only 40% of American workers say they were recognized during one year of working for their employer, and only once! That means fully 60% of American employees work all year and never receive even one commendation from their employer. A good mystery shopping program can help to uncover weak areas that need improvement, but the real purpose is to find what’s right and build on that.

We firmly believe positive recognition breeds change. Our mystery shopping program finds associates doing something right and suggests ways to reward them for their positive behaviors. And this is a win-win for the client too. As other associates see the effects of recognition, they’ll want to model the behaviors that lead to accolades, and the client is rewarded with stores across their entire network that perform brilliantly.

#4 The “Ronco Rotisserie” Effect: ….The program runs itself

Did you ever see the commercial for this roasting oven with the tag line, “Set it and forget it!”? Unfortunately, mystery shopping programs are not like that product. You can’t put your program on autopilot and expect it to run itself, and then expect a great outcome. TLC is required from both the provider and the end user. It’s important to understand up front that mystery shopping is as much about proactive activity as it is about collecting data. For mystery shopping to be successful, it takes teamwork, cooperation, and a willingness to see reality as well as potential for improvement. The best mystery shopping programs are living and breathing, changing and maturing as the stores change and grow.

The estimated total number of mystery shops conducted in 2004 was 8.1 million, with an estimated median growth in the number of shops per company of 12.2%. Further the five largest segments, based on percentage of total market size, were:

-Restaurant – 21.5 % (Fast Food – 14%; Casual/Fine Dining – 7.5%)
-Retail – 16.8%
-Banking/Financial – 14.2%
-Gas Station/Convenience Store – 11.8%
-Grocery – 9.1%

The problem is that the viewpoint is incomplete, and the company (end-user) soon concludes the mystery shopping program “isn’t working.” It’s like taking a picture of a group of people with their backs to you, and then when the film is developed and you can’t see their faces, blaming Kodak.

The best organizatons offer a variety of measurement strategies to form a complete picture of what your customers are currently experiencing as they shop in your store. In other words do not just do a loss prevention mystery shop thinking that it is the panacea to all your problems. Sometimes there may be a need to have several mystery shopping programs targeting different areas of the operation.

So choose your provider wisely. Make sure they understand your needs and are willing to customize their programs to your short and long term goals. Don’t pick one component of an integrated program and focus on it to the exclusion of all others. If so, your data will not show the true picture, your results will be skewed and any improvements based on that data will not bring the hope-for changes. Instead, aim for a holistic approach to the customer experience that gathers data from multiple metrics that address all aspects of the typical customer’s visit, from frontline staff to clean restrooms, for a complete overview of how your customer might perceive your brand.

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.

Maximization vs. Optimization is based on a very sound mystery shopping formula:
When budgets are limited, it is generally better to shop fewer stores on a more frequent basis than all stores less frequently.

You may, for example, decide it is more important to shop your top 30 best-performing stores. Or you may want to establish different frequencies, or rotate your stores and districts. There are an infinite variety of ways to create the program that works best for you, but the bottom line is to remember that there are enough variations possible to allow you to get the most out of your program without sacrificing the crucial data you need to meet your program goals. When it comes down to whether you should conduct your program quarterly, monthly, weekly or daily, there are other factors to consider:

Quarterly
Great for compiling a “snapshot” of data but, with so much time elapsed in between shops, it is very difficult to use data to effectively make consistent changes or drive behaviors. Acceptable for monitoring and data collection.

Monthly
Monthly programs are the most popular and budget-friendly choice. A monthly program means a more consistent view of store/team performance, more dependable behavior reinforcement, and more effective identification of strengths and opportunities over the long term

Weekly or Biweekly
For those wishing to implement a variable program based upon stores types (i.e. such as with high and low volume stores, loss prevention, etc.), a weekly or biweekly program is very effective in driving behavioral changes through constant reinforcement.

Daily
Unless your main goal is loss prevention, a daily program is most likely overkill. In fact, if your main goal really is loss prevention, you are probably more in need of hidden cameras than mystery shopping. Daily programs produce a lot of data that will prove to be useless, since the Manager will not have the time or opportunity to understand and use the data that is produced on a daily basis.

The second most popular question I am asked (especially by naysayers of mystery shopping or those who get low scores) is something along the lines of, “Hey this is only one shop a month. How can this really demonstrate what is happening in my store?”

Sadly, statistically it can’t. And therein lies the mystery shopping conundrum. Stores with a smaller budget perform fewer shops. Fewer shops lead to less credible data. Less credible data leads to less opportunity to change behaviors and delayed gratification in meeting overall program goals. It also translates into fewer opportunites for training for the entire store. This is exactly why I advocate the Maximization vs. Optimization formula we talked about earlier. Simply put, you’re getting the biggest bang for your buck without compromising.

The truth is, anything can happen anytime. But if it happened once, it’s happened before and will happen again. When it does happen again, that’s when it is time to become concerned. Can you imagine a sports game being played where no one announces the score? Sounds ridiculous? Well just imagine for a moment, what that would be like……those basketball teams are running up and down the court, throwing baskets on both sides, but since no one is keeping score, no one is leading! Soon, the players begin tiring out. They start walking off the court and sitting down. After all, who cares about working hard if no one is winning? Then, one by one, the fans begin to get up and go home. If the team doesn’t care, why should they?

Do you see the point? Just like in basketball, where the players play harder when they know the score, your frontline staff and store managers will be far more effective when they can see the results of their hard work. Regular, consistent data delivered as expected, in an easily digested format that can be used to direct and change staff behavior, is what wins the retail race.

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.

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.”

Why has health care turned to mystery shopping? Certainly, health care professionals are concerned about providing optimum patient care. But there’s another important reason: The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services began using targeted surveys, the answers to which are public, to assess patient satisfaction at hospitals across the United States on October 1, 2006. Patients can visit www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov to compare various areas of clinical care, revolutionizing the manner in which health care is delivered by allowing potential patients to review and compare satisfaction scores across our nation’s hospitals.

And it doesn’t stop there. Patient reviews are affecting the pocketbooks of hospital executives.

Mel Hall, president and CEO of Press Ganey Associates Inc., a South Bend, Ind., company specializing in patient-satisfaction assessment, stated, “More than 55% of hospital chief executive officers surveyed last year have “some compensation at risk,” based on patient satisfaction, up from only 8% to 10% a dozen years ago.”

So how exactly does mystery shopping work in a health care setting?
The staff is informed only of a general range of time when mystery patients might show up. Sometimes patients, who usually pose as uninsured, reveal themselves at the end of a visit, but not always. Mystery shops can be completed by phone, in the doctor’s office, in the emergency room or in specialty care facilities, with shoppers hiding tape recorders, pretending to take notes during the exam, or running to the bathroom to jot down notes.
There are two main issues arising from this new form of mystery shopping: the concern that ‘fake’ patients will use up resources that could be going to truly sick patients, (shoppers are instructed to arrive at least busy times) and the feeling staff and doctors have that they are being spied on. A good mystery shopping company has the available tools and resources to resolve these issues. And once staff understands the importance of mystery shopping for improving patient services, many typical fears about mystery shopping vanish.

Becky Zuccarelli, Ohio Health System’s Vice President of Customer Service, says OhioHealth spent $44,000 on mystery shopping over one year, covering 240 mystery patient visits. The organization has since established in-house mystery shopping and routinely rewards high performing employees with motivational incentives like small cash prizes, gift cards, better parking spaces, and public recognition. The greatest benefit has been a reduction in the employee turnover rate, which dropped from 18% in 2000 to 11.5% in 2006.
Medical mystery shopping is just another example of how the right mystery shopping program and the right data used in the right way can make something as common as a visit to the doctor’s office into an excellent customer experience.

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.

Mystery shopping provides an objective service evaluation based on factual observations, using people who are trained to know what to look for when conducting evaluations. IVR, or for that matter, any form of customer satisfaction surveys, capture highly subjective feelings and emotions only. Facts may or may not play a part in the responses, skewing the final data.

The core difference between the two is that mystery shopping is a customer experience measure based on a predetermined set of assessment criteria. IVR surveys, however, are used either as customer satisfaction measures or as customer experience measures based on the customer’s recollection of subjective memory.

While IVR may be useful to a company seeking information on extremes of service (i.e., excellent versus poor), as extreme experiences often motivate customers to respond to IVR opportunities, the fact is that when seeking benchmarks from actual customer experiences, mystery shopping is better able to provide valid data.

The MSPA believes that a company should consider using both services if their budget allows, so that they have both objective, fact-based research as well as subjective, opinion-based research on which to make important, organization-changing decisions. Using both services provides a more complete picture of the customer experience. The MSPA does not advocate replacing either service with the other.

Let’s look at a few examples of sentences that, with just a bit of tweaking, can give you the targeted data you need:

1) Did the associate seem to be enjoying their job?

This question can only be answered subjectively. Two people may have very different views about whether the employee looked liked she was enjoying her job.

A better question would be:

2) Throughout the store, if associates were completing tasks, and/or helping other customers, did they make time to acknowledge and assist you?

This question captures the concept of prioritizing the customer over and above any other store related tasks or activities, an answer that can be determined objectively by observing the employee.

Here’s another one:

3) Were the associates dressed fashionably?
Who determines what style of clothing is ‘fashionable’? This question is clearly subjective.

A better way to ask this question is:

Were associates dressed appropriately, and in keeping with the store’s image?
This sentence provides a “point of reference” for the field rep, and allowing for a more objective response.

It’s not hard to see how changing survey questions slightly to be more objective can lead to better data that more accurately reflects true behaviors and adherence to store policies so you can move forward with the necessary improvements and commendations for a job well done.