Mystery Shopping Can Help Customer Service
Mystery Shopping Can Help Customer Service – One very effective way of finding out exactly how your staff treat your customers is to carry out a mystery shopper exercise. This means that you, or someone appointed by you, adopts the role of a customer to ascertain how your staff behave in the following areas:
- dealing with telephone inquiries
- dealing with face-to-face inquiries
- selling good or services
- ordering goods to be collected and delivered
- arranging delivery of goods to a customer’s premises
- ensuring that delivery of the correct goods is carried out on schedule
- dealing with the return of faulty or unwanted goods
- dealing with compliments [face to face and over the telephone]
- dealing with a “difficult” person and
- any other areas relative to your business
The results of the mystery shopping will highlight situations that your staff need to deal with. You may not anticipate this, so this provides an opportunity to revise and improve your standards and procedures.
Before carrying out a mystery shopper exercise, create a checklist of all the aspects you would like to review. For a face-to-face exercise these could include:
- time taken to acknowledge and greet you
- if there was a queue, how many people were in it?
- friendliness of the greeting
- attentiveness of listening
- accurate understanding of your needs
- appropriateness of response
- accuracy of information provided
- speed of service
- standard of personal appearance
- general demeanour of the team members
- cleanliness and tidiness of the premises
For a telephone exercise, the following could also be included:
- time taken to answer the phone
- friendliness and clarity of the greeting
- ease of being connected to the appropriate person
- if placed on hold, for how long?
- if a request for a call back was made, did it happen and how long did it take?
Mystery Shopping is a fun, informative and must-do exercise if you are in a business that provides customer service. The results of a mystery shopping exercise can also guide your training and development needs. Mystery Shopping also helps to mould and re-shape your policies and procedures making your business easy and enjoyable. Customers want to have a pleasurable experience with little or no hassle.
