Tag: bank mystery shopping

Companies can realize unanticipated rewards when they change their approach to how shoppers gather the information or add mystery shop sections. As the examples below illustrate, the rewards may include improved safety measures and even the discovery of website pitfalls, to name two.

For an automotive client, adding non customer service questions to the mystery shopper survey resulted in valuable data and potential savings in safety-related areas for the company.  The company consulted with other departments to gain ideas on areas that mystery shoppers should assess at their locations. In response, Confero added several safety-related questions to the survey.  Following the visits with the added survey questions, management was able to quickly view mystery shop results through a secure web-based reporting system, including the information about safety procedures. The results: fast data on safety deficiencies at certain locations as well as decreased number of accidents, due to the increased accountability that the mystery shop program created. You can view other stories on our Automotive Mystery Shopping and Customer Experience Research Case Studies page.

Once thought to be a declining delivery channel, the bank branch remains an integral part of the customer experience.  With troublesome financial institution performance in the limelight during the past years, customers use face to face branch visits as a means to develop trust with financial institution employees.

Banks are thinking about imposing annual fees of $25 or $30 on debit cards, according to people familiar with bank strategies.  Other banks will increase fees on checking accounts. For example, during 2011, Bank of America will offer four basic checking accounts in some states, instead of three.  Three of the four will offer ways for customers to avoid fees, while the fourth, the Essentials account, has an unavoidable monthly fee between $6 and $9.  Chase Bank will charge a $6 monthly fee on one of their checking accounts, however, customers can avoid the fee with a $500 or more monthly deposit to the account, or when they use their debit cards five times during the month.

Considering telephone mystery shopping call scenarios for your bank ? A good starting point is to think about the client interactions that are most critical to the achievement of your bank’s sales and service goals.

Businesses considering mystery shopping services sometimes ask us about “interview bias,” or the concern that the mystery shopper will sway the employee to behave in a certain way or that the mystery shopper will bring opinions to the shop visit which might affect the outcome of the research.