How Mystery Shopping Improves Sales?
How Mystery Shopping Improves Sales?
Written by John A Denver
Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Mystery-Shopping-Improves-Sales?&id=7516497
Mystery shoppers are people who pose as real customers and find out how your employees are handling customers. Hiring a mystery shopping service will let you gain valuable insight into many unknown facets of your company. The ultimate aim of mystery shoppers is to increase the profitability of your business by boosting up your bottom line and service quality.
What does a good mystery shopper do?
An expert Mystery shopper will present his/her observations in a way that will allow the employer to understand the strengths and weaknesses of his staff. Good mystery shoppers are usually the members of international associations like “Mystery Shopping Provider Association” and they have special techniques of reporting marketing and consumer experiences.
They have a specific schedule which they use to time their expeditions and present information in an organised manner which includes giving data that tracks improvement after the implementation of specific training modules.
Top mystery shopping companies also provide competitor analysis reports which will let you know your exact position in terms of strengths, weaknesses and possible opportunities.
Direct evaluation of customer interaction skills
You might think that you already have systems in place which help you evaluate the skills and customer interaction quality of your employees. However the results visible in a performance management audit or a service evaluation are not 100% reliable.
Most employees will brush up their skill sets and be super careful during audits that they are already aware of. Mystery shoppers have the capacity of delivering realistic reports to you as they place random calls or make unexpected visits to your service centre.
As employees are not aware that there is an evaluation going on they behave in a realistic and natural way. Most professional mystery shoppers will give you video/ audio records as feedback of the quality of interaction and you can directly evaluate the performance of your employees.
Strict quality control
If you improve the quality of customer experiences delivered by your employees, you are sure to boost your bottom lines. Better experiences will encourage existing customers by spreading the good word around by positive word of mouth.
Mystery shoppers offer you the unique opportunity of developing a great way to control the quality of customer service provided by your business. The reports submitted by your hired shoppers will help you identify the weaknesses and strengths of your team. You will also be able to identify opportunities for improvement.
Refinement of sales skills and enhanced service quality are two important benefits of providing training based on feedback provided by your mystery shoppers.
An unbiased viewpoint
Managers often make the common mistake of asking their friends to conduct mystery shopping expeditions for their company. However a person who is inexperienced in mystery shopping will not be trained to recreate consumer experiences and to ask meaningful questions.
