Improving your customers' experience through mystery shopping

Excellence in customer service is a powerful means of differentiating your offer. Going beyond customer expectations will drive loyalty and enhance your reputation by word of mouth and, increasingly, by social media.

But how can you ensure that you deliver consistently great service on every customer interaction? You can focus on recruitment of high calibre staff, put in place training regimes, set standards for your front-line staff and use motivational tools to drive up performance. You can conduct customer satisfaction surveys to evaluate the outcomes. However, formulating improvement strategies must be informed by a good understanding of your current performance, that is what really happens when your customers experience your organisation and interact with your staff. This is where mystery shopping comes in, helping you to:

• Objectively assess the customer experience at the point of interaction
• Evaluating whether the actual customer experience marries up with your intentions
• Identifying where and how you can make improvements
• Developing benchmarks on which you can track change over time
• Comparing different sites, different staff groups, different customer groups, different types of interactions and different time periods
• Comparing your own service against your competitors or against 'best in class' providers in any sector

In tandem with the knowledge you have of your customers' expectations, mystery shopping feedback helps determine where you should focus your resources and training. Ultimately it can help you 'raise the bar' on your own internal service targets, improve your image and ensure the best service experience for your customers.