Measuring your service
To improve your sales you need knowledge. Knowledge about your service. Knowledge about what your customers expect. In fact, you may have already undertaken some evaluations already such as:
- Feedback forms
- Interviews
- Surveys (online or offline)
- Internal evaluations by staff
- Direct mail-outs to clients
- Questionnaires in magazines
But these methods often don’t identify opportunities for increased sales nor do they give you the concrete answers you need in order to improve service areas. There are a couple of reasons for this:
- Customer service evaluations need to be detailed – Customer service evaluations must be detailed enough to enable direct service improvement. If the issues you need to improve are extensive, you cannot possibly expect the average customer to be able to analyse and identify the real issue at hand. It is also difficult to have a detailed survey that a customer will still take time to complete. Companies often resort to offering a prize or other incentive for completing the survey. This biases the results as the customer is completing it for their own reasons.
- Most voluntary surveys are bias and inaccurate – customers who voluntarily fill out surveys usually do so for their own reasons (the data will be from extreme ends of the spectrum – the extremely satisfied to the extremely dissatisfied). They are often influenced by their mood and therefore the results are unreliable. For example, if a customer has had an overall negative experience, they are more likely to rate everything poorly, and vice versa with a customer who has had a positive experience.
Internal customer service evaluations by staff also fail to identify key issues. Staff have a trained eye, and are emotionally tied to the store. They also have their own unique agenda. - Surveys need to be action-oriented – the data you collect should be implementable – you should be able to implement significant organisational change from it. Customer feedback cards that rate satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10 do not give you any detailed information that you can use.
The Mystery Shopping Difference
Mystery shopping has been designed to provide you with feedback from someone who matters – a customer, whilst still eliminating the problems with other customer service evaluations.
Mystery shopping surveys are conducted by a shopper, who is trained by us to look out for and rate certain features of your service. They go into your store, and experience your service just like a regular customer, but give detailed feedback in specific areas that are proven to influence sales. The questionnaires are answered objectively and report only facts about your business and its level of service. The result is that you get accurate, structured and detailed information about your service which highlights where there are opportunities for increased sales.
Back to the Mystery Shopping page.