Customer service evaluation is a relevant issue of today’s retail. One of the techniques of conducting evaluation is “Mystery Shopping” (it is also called “Mystery Shopper”). It gives an opportunity to control quality of service and to receive a feedback on strengths and weaknesses of front-line performance – the workers who interacts with end-consumer directly. However this seemingly understandable resource has its pitfalls.

Let’s look at some nuances that are not obvious but affects the quality of the research.

• • Mystery Shopper’s Qualification

If selected agents do not usually work with sales a company may receive incorrect information about the real condition of its service. The information cannot be effective because of lack of expertise. The agents don’t see the details real service create. This is why this kind of research only gives an approximate idea of how employees work with consumers. There is an alternative way of hiring professionals for mystery shopping. The effectiveness of evaluation grows, though the costs grow along with it – you have to pay for qualification.

• • Questionnaire

Overall customer service control involves working with questionnaires. A client can design a questionnaire using his company’s resources or this task can be outsourced. Let’s review pros and cons of both approaches.

Questionnaire designed by the client’s company: the client will pay more attention to the specifics of his business and probably less attention to the structure, objectivity, and fullness of evaluation criteria.

Questionnaire from an outsourcer will have more expertise and allow an independent view however might not be adapted to the specifics of the business. This happens because no outsourcer, even the most qualified, can have the same knowledge about the business as company does. More than that, irresponsible outsourcer will likely not go too far in the company’s specifics providing a standard form of questionnaire.

• • Preparation and Execution

The more complex the questionnaire the higher demands to agents. Training should include the information about the formal components of the procedure (legend, schedules, rules of questionnaire completion) and form the skill of behavioral analysis. It is important that not only agents know what personnel should demonstrate while serving customers but also how they should do that. Thus customer service evaluation may cause objectivity error as it depends directly on the training level of mystery shoppers.

• • Summary

The Mystery Shopping technique will be effective if two conditions are met: transparency and relevancy. To maintain overall quality assurance audit of front-line employees it’s necessary to introduce them with audit criteria.

Transparency of the procedure guarantees staff involvement. Personnel will accept the evaluation results.

Relevancy. Outsourcer should provide the operative report within three weeks after the procedure is finished. Otherwise the procedure will stop being a management tool. Management of the company should work immediately on the issues pointed out by the report.

An area of risk is desire of the company to save and perform several tasks at the same time: to control the standards compliance by personnel and find out about customer’s service expectations. Needless to say that for each of these tasks there should be a separate questionnaire and a special training. Standards compliance requires formal questionnaire design and development of the skill a person uses to compare behavior with a given standard; client’s experience can be described more emotionally and subjective.

We hope that this information will help you make your business more hospitable.

 Authors: Experts of Kraskovski