Quality of service, which stimulates sales and distribution, is an important competitive edge of any company.
Unscrupulous personnel work may cause 50% loss in profit. You can avoid such a trouble with the use of the research called Mystery Shopping, which is the best one to estimate service.
This method is used to estimate:
- Quality of service,
- Sales technique,
- Trading floor decoration and corporate style,
- Appearance and behavior of sales assistants,
- Examine sales assistants’ integrity and compliance of terms of agreements with suppliers.
Your company’s intelligence agents are “Mystery shoppers”, which visit your store, cafe, bank, insurance company and estimate the service, provided by your personnel. Mystery shoppers are our employees, which have been specially trained.
Estimation system is developed in order to consider both general impression and specific skills of personnel:
- Greeting clients, behaving in a friendly and attentive manner,
- Initiating contact and starting conversation,
- Asking questions and listening correctly so that evident and hidden customer's needs became clear,
- Describing a product in simple words but stressing the aspects, which are the most important for customer,
- Mastering objections correctly,
- Finishing the conversation in such a way that customer would get back to make a purchase.
- Estimate dynamic characteristics of service (quickness, slowness).
In Mystery Shopping research special attention is paid to consideration of psychological component. In the process of questionnaire development and results analysis, we consider not only substantial speech characteristics, but also the full range of unconscious information, which matters in communication process (mimics, poses, movements, paralinguistic speech characteristics).
Secrecy and suddenness are the advantages of Mystery Shopping. After special training, interviewer makes a purchase or gets service and records the conversation with a voice recorder. Then he or she leaves a store and estimates the quality of service according to special questionnaire. Sales assistant suspects nothing about examination.
Other service estimation techniques have a number of weaknesses, and insufficiency of information is the most significant one. Other techniques include:
- Traditional inspections and raids. They are frequently disclosed beforehand.
- Interviews with clients and buyers. Buyers may miss something or not know about the standards of service.
Deliverables of the program “Mystery shopping”:
- Report on the research with detailed analysis of strength and weaknesses.
- High-quality customer service system development. It may include service standards, behavioral requirements, operating procedures, etc.
- Decision of training necessity, or even its development. Training requires focusing on the moments which need to be improved. After a series of trainings new wave of the research Mystery shopping is conducted often. It is needed to estimate the effectiveness of training.
- Motivation program, developed according to Mystery Shopping results. You can introduce benefit system as well as penalty system. The system must be based either on specific infringements or oppositely on employees’ achievements as well as service coefficients which are given to sales assistants according to examination results until the next wave of Mystery shopping research takes place.
