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Mystery Shopping:
After incorporating the customer survey information into your service standards, you must assure that your organization adheres to those standards. Along with ongoing Customer Surveys and Internal Quality Control Systems, Mystery Shopping can be an important tool for measuring compliance with your service standards and improving organizational excellence.
Mystery shoppers secretly pose as customers and evaluate your service based on a set of predetermined criteria. Some advantages of Mystery Shopping are:
- Mystery Shoppers provide objective observation from someone outside your organization.
- Whereas customer surveys must focus on a few questions, Mystery Shoppers can evaluate a wide variety of performance criteria in great detail.
- When Internal Quality Control Systems cannot be used, Mystery Shopping is irreplaceable.
Used properly, Mystery Shopping is an effective tool in your Performance Management arsenal, but it does have some inherent disadvantages. Some disadvantages of Mystery Shopping are:
- High Quality Mystery Shopping is expensive.
- Cheap Mystery Shopping is worthless. Mystery Shoppers must be intelligent and well-trained.
- The same information can often be gained with well-managed Internal Quality Control Systems.
William Kerr Agency Mystery Shoppers are well-trained and highly motivated. Many Mystery shopping companies staff based only on how cheaply a shopper will work. You cannot achieve accurate data by shopping an up-scale eatery with a teenager whose idea of gourmet dining is super-sizing a burger deal. We recruit and evaluate our Mystery Shoppers based upon rigid criteria including:
- Communication skills.
- Ability to follow instructions and therefore, return accurate information.
- Experience in your specific industry where required.
- Conformation to your target demographic when specific industry experience is not necessary.
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