If you have a retail business that depends on your employees selling things to consumers.
That's a pretty important reason to need a Mystery Shopping program by itself.
If you're still not convinced to have a mystery shopping plan in your business activities, then let us shed some light on it.
If your business depends on sales (products or services), those sales depend on the customer's experience and loyalty.
Customer service plays a vital role for a company, giving it an edge over its competitors. A research shows that the online retail sales are nearing the figure of 20 billion, which is astonishing. The advantage of a 'brick and mortar' store over its online counterpart is customer service face to face.
Here are the reasons why you need the Mystery Shopping program for your retail business
1.Helps you improve customer service
While you can monitor sales to determine which locations do not meet your goals, you need time and energy. A good Mystery Shopping program lets you determine which locations are current or possible problems, and provide feedback on how to improve customer service there.
Just as you measure and maintain the machine, Mystery Shopping can act as a preventive customer service. Possible service problems may be disclosed before they affect sales.
2. Helps you to excel behavior
The Hawthorne effect shows us that observation affects behavior.
Sure, you have regional representatives who go to places and see if your standards and core values are properly reflected on the front lines, but employees change their habits around their peers and superiors. The regional manager will not find out that the store employee encourages his customers to buy from competitors who may have better quality or lower prices, without the opinion of customers and mystery customers.
A mysterious customer can interact with the staff anonymously and therefore receive a real service. The authentic interaction between the Mystery Client and the staff can then be objectively evaluated and compared with other locations with the same criteria. The mystery shopping program eliminates the variable that causes an oblique result.
3. Increase Consistency
The Mystery Shopping program ensures that all the benchmark is met and it also monitors the consistency between locations.
For Example: If a customer receives excellent service in one of the stores, he should receive the same level of service in other stores.
However, this is not the reality of retail trade or any industry of goods and services; the quality varies.
In order to provide excellent consistent service to your customer, you need mystery shopping plan.
4. It will maintain the overall work environment
A coherent mystery Shopping program will help you hire, train and maintain contact with employees.
Including case studies on what to do and what not to do?
The program will both communicate company expectations and assessments based on these criteria, making expectations clearly and consistently strengthened.
In addition to the Mystery Shopping program, we also advise clients to implement a survey regarding the opinions of team members to monitor the internal understanding of its expectations and identify the Employee Net Promoter Score, i.e. the level and quality of your employees' loyalty and ambassadorship.
5. Helps to initiate rewards and incentives
Who would not like the chance to recognize and reward their best team members? Everyone loves to say that they do a great job.
The company can initiate rewards and incentives for the best employees. It can be a night of prizes, bonuses for the best places, even KPI for salaries and commissions. They help the team morale and promote the idea of employees as brand ambassadors.
The measurement and monitoring service is the first step towards improving services, which leads to increased sales. You need an anonymous assessor, not internal representatives who are leaning results and a consistent program, so results can have a multi-layered effect.
There will always be ups and downs, new competitors, technological changes, etc., Always focus on customer service, because that's what drives sales. It is prudent to ensure that your company is doing everything it can to evaluate, improve and take advantage of this customer service.
Conclusion
Every improvement you make in your business as a result of practical insights gained through the mystery shopping program leads to better customer service, which in turn leads to the fact that customers choose your company above the competition.
Do you still think that mysterious purchases are too subjective? Mystery shopping is primarily data: solid questions, trained mysterious clients and solid answers to generate useful insights. These insights then form the basis for your next step forward.