Mystery Shopping | Understanding Your Business Through The Eyes Of Your Customer | Interview with Gina Wiseman
On March 24, 2005, Gina Wiseman, Division Vice President for Maritz Research was interviewed by Larry Albus of "Marketing Matters Live," presented by the American Marketing Association, on WSRadio.com, the worldwide leader in Internet talk. The segment was titled "Understanding Your Business Through The Eyes Of Your Customer." Following are edited excerpts of the broadcast.
Larry: Give us a definition of Mystery Shopping.
Gina: Essentially it's a form of quality assurance monitoring. We send people into retail facilities, posing as customers, to go through an actual product or service experience. Those shoppers record the incidence of specific events or employee behaviors, and often make additional measurements or observations regarding the experience as well.
Mystery Shopping has some real benefits and insights for companies. It enables an organization to monitor compliance with products and service delivery standards and specifications. It enables marketers to look at the gap between promises made through advertising or promotions and the actual service delivery. It can be a useful tool in monitoring the impact that training and performance improvement initiatives have on compliance.
Mystery shopping also has some important limitations that are important for companies to understand:
Limited projectability – while mystery shoppers are viewing products and service experiences from the "customer's side of the table", shoppers are not real customers.
What gets measured as part of your program must be based on actual customer expectations, needs and requirements. In other words, the "real" voice of the customer provides the foundation for mystery shopping. Finally, it is key to keep what gets measured consistent with evolving customer needs and expectations. As your customers' needs change, so should your mystery shop program.Larry: The concept of Mystery Shopping isn't new. What's making it so hot right now?
Gina: Mystery Shopping has been around for a long time. I think it's getting a lot of attention right now because many companies realize that Mystery Shopping is a great technique that provides information that may not be available through traditional customer satisfaction surveys.
For some industries, it's the most efficient way to track performance at the individual retail unit level. For others, it's a really great tool to be used in conjunction with traditional customer satisfaction measurement.
Consumers have many choices available to them today, and their expectations of customer service are ever-increasing. When you couple that with the decay in customer service in many industries, you can see why more and more companies are interested in discovering whether the service they deliver is in sync with the specifications established.
Larry: Can you tell us more about the types of questions companies are looking to answer with this technique and how it then fits with other types of customer satisfaction research?
Gina: Mystery Shopping is typically used to identify gaps that exist between the standards a company has set for service delivery and actual delivery. Companies are normally looking to answer questions that explore the gaps in three general areas: Customer Service Standards, Image Standards, and Brand Standards.
Customer Service Standards represent management's operationalization of the voice of the customer – the standards put in place to deliver service in a way that meets or exceeds customer expectation. Image Standards are also based on the voice of your customer – those standards that you want your locations to put forth in terms of cleanliness, facility hygiene, and appearance. Brand Standards tend to be more internally focused and are developed through key business initiatives. These have to do more with how you want your brand to be portrayed at the outlet level. Do you want specific signage up? Specific logos or company colors to be in place?
Larry: What types of companies are getting into this, and what are the specific drivers that are making them right for Mystery Shopping?
Gina: Mystery Shopping is found in most industries – financial services, automotive, hospitality, telecommunications, retail, and the entertainment industry. Wherever a company has customer facing employees, whether that be in person, on the phone, or online, they're a prime candidate for having a Mystery Shop program of some nature, to monitor gaps in service delivery.
Larry: Tell us about your experiences with gas stations.
Gina: We do a significant amount of business in the retail petroleum industry. Programs for gas companies have traditionally contained criteria that measure compliance to customer service standards. What we've seen recently is a shift in focus spurred by increased competition. Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, Costco, and even grocery stores now sell gas. Traditional service stations are realizing that in addition to having many locations and offering good gas at a fair price, they really have to differentiate themselves with excellent customer service. They realize that is what's going to bring customers back and help them to acquire new customers. Their competitive environment is changing, and so are their Mystery Shop programs.
They utilize this tool to measure compliance to their image and brand standards, as well.
Larry: What about fast food?
Gina: The QSR (Quick Service Restaurant) industry, or fast food industry, is a huge user of Mystery Shopping to measure compliance to standards. Almost every large QSR chain has some form of Mystery Shop program in place at either a national or regional level.
For example, several years ago a major company made a significant investment in a corporate-sponsored program to monitor whether their restaurants were operating with consistent standards for customer service, food quality, and cleanliness. This program has gone a long way toward helping this company get back to delivering a more consistent customer experience at its thousands of locations. And it's also had a positive impact on their bottom line.
Another QSR company that uses Mystery Shopping to measure compliance integrates an instant recognition component to the shop. Shoppers go in, and if during a shop they find that the crew members exhibit the correct behaviors as far as service and suggestive selling techniques, food quality, and facility cleanliness are concerned, the mystery shopper works with the store manager to distribute on-the-spot rewards to the crew.
They've shown that having this program in place motivates their employees to put forth more consistent service delivery to their customers. It's also been known to increase store sales by motivating suggestive selling and up-selling techniques, which add dollars to customer transactions.
Larry: Are banks using Mystery Shopping in a similar manner to gas stations and the QSR industry?
Gina: Mystery Shopping has widespread use throughout the financial services industry, from retail banking to insurance to investment banking. They use Mystery Shopping to monitor compliance of their staff. Programs run the gamut from conducting a simple transaction, such as cashing a check, to inquiring about specific bank products, to more complex "transactions" such as working with a financial adviser and assessing whether or not they're offering products to meet the customer's needs.
We do a fairly unique program for a large retail bank, where they not only collect customer satisfaction data at the financial center level, but we also designed a program to recruit shoppers to actually become customers. The shoppers actually open an account and then we track their experiences throughout a typical customer life cycle. Over several months, shoppers visit the banks to conduct teller transactions, ATM transactions, and make product inquiries. They track materials that are received at home, and how long it takes to receive checks or their ATM card. Then they close the account. The company is able to get some good information that goes back to their financial centers that tells them specifically how they measured up against corporate standards and the criteria for each type of interaction that we send the shoppers through.
Larry: How is the US Post Office engaging mystery shopping to improve performance?
Gina: They are very committed to improving the customer experience at retail facilities. They conduct over 70,000 retail shops each year and they use Mystery Shopping as a tool to help their employees at the front line strengthen the service given to customers and also to help them accurately perform all of the operations of the post office. They use the data to assess whether or not each site meets customer service standards, provides highly accurate transactions to customers, and complies with basic standards of quality. They realize keenly that they have increased competitive pressures. They need to understand exactly what their customers want and are very serious about driving positive behavior changes back down to the location level with this program.
Larry: What are some important considerations when setting up a Mystery Shopping program? What do you do with the data?
Gina: It's extremely important for companies to establish service standards that are based on actual customer data. In other words, make sure that you're measuring those areas that will have an impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty. If companies fail to do that, they could end up with a disconnect between what they're measuring and actual behaviors that drive customer satisfaction.
It's important for a company that's considering a program to understand that there are a few key elements that make a program successful. They must:
- Think about what they want to measure, based on the voice of the customer;
- Which outlets they want to measure and how often;
- How they want to communicate the program to the organization;
- How they want to disseminate results;
- And how they plan to take corrective action and provide training for continuous improvement.
The program should be driven by what your customers are telling you they want, and should be measuring what your brand communications are telling your customers. If you design a program that is not based on these things, you may end up spending a lot of time, energy, and money on a program that doesn't deliver real, positive business results.
It's also very important to gain buy-in from key areas within your organization. People are much more likely to support a program that they helped create. If you get that buy-in at the outset, you can deploy a program much more easily than if you are continually fighting internally with stakeholders that were left out of the process. We've learned after many years that this is a key component to the success of a program.
Larry: What kinds of considerations should we be looking for when choosing a possible partner to help implement a Mystery Shopping Program?
Gina: Mystery Shopping can look like a very simple process. But imagine conducting hundreds of thousands of mystery shops each year – at any given time there are literally thousands of moving parts that must be managed in a quality manner. It's important to choose a partner that has real sound systems in place to manage all of those moving parts.
The key is for a firm to have strong relationships with a large, established base of experienced shoppers. It's not necessarily the number of shoppers that you have in your database – you do need national representation – but having strong relationships with those shoppers goes a long way to being able to complete quality shops in a timely manner. A firm should also have experience in your industry.
To ensure a sound research design, it's important that they understand the nuances of your customer database, your channel partners and your distribution process. That goes a long way to matching the Mystery Shop Program to the needs of your industry. The one size fits all mentality just doesn't work for Mystery Shop programs.
The firm should have really strong systems that can manage all the various technical aspects of programs, from assignments to shoppers, deployment of communications to shoppers in a clear and concise manner, including the data collection process, quality reviews of the data, etc.
Data reporting should also be a key consideration, in that it should be meaningful and actionable at many different levels within a corporation. Recognize that how you report data at the corporate level is not necessarily the same way that you should report data to your field organization. Those users probably have different needs and ways to view the data and incorporate it into action plans.
And most importantly, companies should understand the importance of working with a partner with an established quality management system. It is important for a supplier to have the systems and processes in place to ensure that the shops get done on time and in a quality manner, that guidelines for shoppers are administered consistently and that data review processes exist to keep poor quality data from being reported. This will help ensure the integrity of the program and the results at all levels.
Larry: Well, it seems that you'd be ahead of the game if you could integrate the Mystery Shopping Program with your Customer Satisfaction Program or your Frequency Program and an Employee Recognition Rewards Programs.
Gina: Companies would definitely benefit from building a more integrative approach for capturing and utilizing the voice of the customer, with Mystery Shopping being one of those components. We believe this is best done by employing multiple and complementary methods of listening, which is why we often recommend both Mystery Shopping and Customer Satisfaction Surveys to our clients. It is also critical to adopt a 'What gets rewarded gets done' philosophy. Companies should definitely consider incorporating a Reward and Recognition Program to reinforce the positive behavior changes that will close the gaps in the customer experience and really bring the program to life.
Larry: Do you find that some companies understand that they need Mystery Shopping, but they don't know how to go about it, and do you help them get the process started?
Gina: We work with many companies that are new to adopting a program and with companies that perhaps have tried it in the past and not been successful. We assess the voice of the customer – what their customers expect – and then take that through the internal organization to create those measurements and communicate them to their field organization; and then provide the training and the actual execution.
Larry: So, the establishment of the objectives must be really important and not too broadly defined?
Gina: Mystery shopping, traditionally, is a tool that's used in a very objective way to get to real critical behaviors and standards by which you measure your front-line employees. Objectives have to be specific and action-oriented. If you gave a report back to somebody that told them how they did on a particular day, that information will be very actionable and allow them to make significant improvements.
Larry: Thanks for your insights, Gina. It's clear that Mystery Shopping is a critical component of the overall marketing branding effort, as well as customer satisfaction and loyalty programs.
Published by Maritz Research
Date: Volume 18 - October 2005
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