Tel:

01204 602420

Fax:

01204 592674

Email:

info@thomsonselectgroup.co.uk

Mystery Customer Programmes

How Mystery Shopping Works

Mystery Shopping can help you to look at your business through customers' eyes. It therefore allows you to measure some of the most important tangible and intangible elements of customer service to help you see what is working for you and issues which may be hampering your performance. Naturally, you will want to develop your business and brand, and understanding what a customer experiences and how this affects their motives for the future will assist with this.

From any company's perspective you will believe that your staff are delivering the expected levels of customer service, that they are passing on the knowledge they have been given to customers, and that they are maintaining a professional image of your products and brand.

Unfortunately, this is not always the case, and these issues are often the hardest to identify. This is where Mystery Shopping can really help. With the use of experienced personnel, we can assess your business from a 'customer's perspective' thus seeing first hand the intangible elements of customer service and sales which are so difficult to analyse in any other way.

By looking at your business through customers' eyes it can help you to meet your business objectives. Although there will be different elements in each company, the fundamental parts are often the same:

• Increase sales and revenue
• Improve service standards and customer satisfaction levels

Mystery Shopping will give you invaluable information about your customers. The process can evaluate every step of the customer journey and thus identify issues arising from poor performance.

The main things that the programme will identify about your staff and their approach are:

Retail

• Are standards being followed?
• Are staff being honest and genuine about the products on offer?
• Do staff show good product knowledge?
• Are staff selling?
• Would customers buy the item, given the service they received?
• What would prevent customers making purchases from this store or staff member?
• Is your brand being well represented?
• Do staff need further training?
• Which are the best and worst performing stores and are there staff who deserve recognition?

Catering, Hospitality and Leisure

• Are all units operating in line with brand standards?
• Are your food and beverage items of the expected quality?
• Are the products served correctly?
• Are customers receiving the service they would expect?
• Is your service well timed?
• Do customers feel they received value for money?
• Are staff upselling?
• Would customers return?
• Do staff need further training?
• Which are the best performing units and are there staff who deserve recognition?

Additionally, the main thing the programme will do is to give you an insight into staff behaviour and how this affects buying motives, repeat business and customer trends.

There is often a 'gap' in a business - the difference between the expected and the actual performance. This could be that you are losing sales, sales conversion ratios have fallen, or that customer satisfaction levels have decreased. Specifically, Mystery Shopper programmes can help reduce the 'gap' and enable you to manage this gap by identifying and dealing with issues, and the reasons for them.

Visits would be conducted to all or some of your units / sites on a frequency which would be agreed given the main aims of the programme. Our personnel act as potential customers and assess everything from the environment in the unit, staff friendliness, product knowledge, their sales ability and product quality.

The personnel will then report back on their findings on a tailor-made questionnaire, in line with the criteria devised specifically for assessing performance standards in your units. This information will be collated and we can then produce a series of statistics to help you evaluate your business as a whole, with information provided for senior management, middle management and at 'unit' level.

By conducting these visits, you will get to see what your customers experience first hand, and it will allow you to identify the reasons for 'gaps' in your business. This is the only real, impartial way of assessing customer service and it is a very cost effective way of assessing and improving your business performance.

Why use Mystery Shoppers?

Mystery Shopping will give you a unique form of customer feedback. Research shows that it is the quality of human interaction which has the greatest affect on customers' perception of a company, visit experience or product.

It will allow you to gain detailed information which would otherwise go unmeasured, which is naturally dependent on the type of businesses you operate.

This system offers an accurate, reliable and inexpensive method of quality control, which provides you with the means of identifying good customer service (which can be rewarded) and the not so good (which can be performance managed).

All of our schemes include the creation of a tailor-made programme, questionnaire and analysis guidelines designed in conjunction with your own aims and objectives.

We also offer bespoke statistics to provide management and business strategy information.

In addition to the 'traditional' mystery shopping, we can assess 'follow-up' procedures such as the purchasing and delivery of products in a Retail capacity, and monitoring the condition of the items received, ensuring on-time delivery, fitting of products and the friendliness / efficiency of delivery personnel. In addition, for non-Retail based assessments, we can follow up on complaint handling and pro-active booking procedures.

"Tailor-made reports, competitively priced"