How Mystery Shopping Can Improve Customer Service

Mystery shopping is a popular tool used by businesses to measure the quality of their services or product delivery from the consumer perspective. Many times the actual delivery at the retail outlet is not up to par with the company’s policies and claims and mystery shoppers can help the company identify whether their frontline staff is providing the standard of service expected of them.

Mystery shopping can help improve customer service in the following ways

• Identify Loop Holes

Mystery shopping is a convenient way for companies to learn about the experiences of their customers and get a better perspective on their service.  Mystery shoppers can give insight on their experience, whether positive and negative and help the customer service team identify the loop holes in the service and improve on it. A mystery shopper will look at various aspects of customer service such as greeting by the staff, timeliness, helpful and friendly attitude, sales pitch, overall attitude and approach towards the customer etc.

• Gain Customer Perspective

Being able to learn about your company through a customer’s outlook, gives your company the edge over your competitors, since you can frame strategies, which will satisfy your customers and help you deliver up to mark. For example in a retail store it is important to understand what the customer is looking for when served by a staff member.

• Evaluate Training Programs

Mystery shopping is also a good check on how well the company has trained its employees and whether their performance is of high standard.  This is a good exercise to measure employee performance and also assess the training department and their strategies. Your company can redesign and improve current training programs for sales and customer service staff after getting strategic feedback from mystery shoppers. It’s important to explain to the employees the mistakes they are making and help them perform better next time, keeping customer satisfaction in mind. The employees are the backbone of the company, so effort and resources must be invested in training them, because happy employees lead to happy customers.

How can mystery shopping be used to measure the quality of service?

Mystery shopping can be used to evaluate the quality of service that is being delivered to the customer and what he or she perceives of the service being provided. The company using mystery customer first needs to be clear on what kind of data they want.

The Case of Mystery Shopping for Airline Industry

For example, let’s take a look at the airline industry and different areas that can be looked into for mining data.

The mystery customer for an airline industry will gauge multiple fronts and study the customer service of the airline. Customer service at every touch point must be kept under notice, from the service of issuing the boarding pass, to the greetings of plane attendants, hospitality and comfort onboard the aircraft and even baggage claim desks.

Areas of customer service will be kept in perspective by the mystery shopper, such as how quick the service response was? Whether the airline staff was well trained, helpful and equipped with providing the customer with a relaxed and comfortable experience. Other factors such as organization, management and even cleanliness of the plane should be kept under consideration.

The experience of the mystery shopper will be used as a benchmark to measure the quality of customer service and performance of the airline.

Once the information from the mystery shopper is put together, all this data should be a valuable resource for the company, which can help in providing exceptional customer service and get at the top of their game.

Mystery shopping can be effectively used in every industry to evaluate the quality of customer service a business is providing and help in improving or maintaining the level of services.