Tag: mystery shopper

You may hope that your associates embody your brand, but do you sometimes fear that employees don’t quite measure up to your brand’s image? When you achieve parity between brand and how your employees interact with customers, it pays off. When associates don’t mirror your brand, it costs companies plenty.

Social media customer interactions constantly evolve and serve to build the brand. As an example, 48% of consumers who used social media for customer service indicated that they used it to praise a company for a positive experience. Although social media creates impact, one fact remains the same: retail level associates remain a large part of the brand experience. In increasingly competitive environments with fast service expectations and sweeping technological changes, the store continues to be a mainstay.

The warning we posted about "Paul Williams" is still valid (see the original post here). . Fortunately, the would-be shopper contacted Confero rather than "Paul Williams. See her comments below. Please note that we NEVER send checks to mystery shoppers, asking them to cash checks and keep part as a payment. All Confero payments are issued to shoppers via PayPal AFTER the mystery shop has been completed, submiitted to Confero and accepted by our client.

On the spot restaurant reviews, customer service remarks, and feedback on wait times. Whatever customers talk about online, managers immediately learn about customer feelings when they monitor social media. While these instantaneous comments are an important part of understanding customer opinions, the feedback is very different from customer experience services such as mystery shops and customer satisfaction surveys.

Casual online comments travel fast, and make a substantial impact on potential customer buying decisions as well as employee morale. Onsite and telephone mystery shopping results help companies reward employees for positive sales behaviors and fine tune training efforts. Customer opinions through web or mobile surveys provide honest input about employees and services. With these differences in mind, and the added complexity of random online comments, many companies wonder how all three types of research fit together.

Last year, we wrote a well-received article about 25 business types for mystery shopping programs, drawing from our years of experience with a variety of clients in many industries. From convenience stores to upscale retailers to restaurants and medical practices, mystery shopping reports go a long way toward revealing how well employees interact with customers on a daily basis.

So, how do our clients use mystery shopping? Mostly, mystery shopping is used to find out about those things customers won’t tell you in surveys or social media comments, or issues you can't discover by asking customers. If our client has a customer service delivery process or set of procedures in place for fulfilling a brand promise in front of a consumer customer, chances are the process can by mystery shopped.

We’ve compiled our top ten list of mystery shopping uses here.

People tend to do those things for which they are rewarded. To encourage employees to provide the customer service promised to our customers, employee incentive and recognition programs are put into place to reward employees who engage in desired behaviors or who achieve specific outcomes.Â

Desired behaviors can be measured by mystery shopping programs, manager reports, audits, customer feedback measures and performance reviews. Specific outcomes can be measured by sales amounts, referral numbers and the like.

No incentive program is perfect and, over time, sometimes employees figure out a way around the system to “earn” the incentive. In other words, sometimes employees “game the system”.

Here are some common games we see. We hope they help you in planning to avoid them.

The Game: Trick the Technology

If an organization uses technology alone to measure key service metrics and reward performance with incentives, the system is usually an easy target for gaming the system.

The modify the order trick. A mystery shopper overheard a training conversation at the first of two drive through windows at a quick service restaurant. When the mystery shopper attempted to hand the employee payment, the mystery shopper heard the trainer saying “No, never just accept the payment. Always be sure to click on Modify Order then click Ok before you accept the customer’s payment. This will restart the timer on our transactions so our service times will look good.”

The ring up single items as multiples trick. At a grocery store checkout, the cashier entered a fresh bagel purchase as