Is Mystery Shopping an Investment or liability?



As Mystery Shopping is also a way to measure employee integrity, the influence on employee’s behavior changes drastically.  A survey conducted by few firms found a clear correlation between a company's attention to customer service and customers' willingness to pay more for good service.
It costs approximately 6 times more money to attract new customers than it does to retain an existing one.

Mystery Shopping is an investment, not a liability and this could be understood, if we look at it closely

Let us consider an example where a company has hired mystery shoppers to check the selling skill of their sales team. In such a case, when the employees come to know that Mystery Shopping program is deployed focusing on suggestive selling, their attitude towards customer changes. Every time a customer visits the store or at cash counter to complete billing, the front end team is aware that their service standards are being checked and in turn they end up doing more of up-selling, and cross selling. Hence, the amount spent on Mystery Shopping gets recovered by the change in behavior of the employee, which has led to an increased ticket value.

In a unique way, the Mystery Shopping program pays for itself! For example, if a company is spending X amount of money for Mystery Shopping on one store, their employees might be exceeding more than that amount on up-selling or cross selling. That’s why this is also termed as program “paying for itself”. When the program pays for itself, Mystery Shopping no more remains the liability, rather it becomes and investment for you. It gives you an ROI, which is not so tangible, but when you see the sales figure, it’s actually shooting up. In a nutshell, the cost incurred on Mystery Shopping is recovered by such induced techniques.

Mystery Shopping also plays a pivot role in follow up part. In industries like real estate, it becomes imperative to follow up with the customer in order to close a deal. Inculcating such proactivness in employees by means of MysteryShopping, keeps them on toes when it comes to a rigorous follow-up.

Same holds true even for industries like automobiles, where certain standard has to be followed and the front end sales team needs to know and tell the customer about USP of the product he is trying to sell. Be it talking about body safety, type, design etc., the front end team needs to speak communicate all, which becomes a selling point for them. Also, when the communication is so much in sync and clear in all the dealership and one voice is going out from everywhere, the brand becomes more stable.

The purpose of Mystery Shopping is to help businesses accelerate sales by assisting in improving customer service by several means, and suggestive selling is one of them. What could be more benefiting then the program paying for itself! If your organization wants to excel and exceed customer satisfaction levels, can you afford not to use Mystery Shopping?



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