Mystery Shopping

Mystery Shopping is the evaluation, measurement and reporting of customer service standards by use of agents acting as if they were customers. It is arguably the fastest and most effective method of obtaining hard objective management data about customer service levels and standards.



OUR OFFERING:
Mystery Shoppers can carry out an audit of your customer service operation by regularly sampling of your service, with a report of each survey as well as periodic summaries of observations. Our agents are ready, available and well spread over Nigeria, they will be able to sample your customer service according to agreed criteria and area o concentration. We also have quality procedures in place to ensure that we in turn provide you with the best possible service.

We carry out sampling visits to your branches and we also sample your contact center for responses to specific or general customer service issues. The benefits to you are:

• cost-effective method of monitoring your customer service standards
• an efficient way of identifying staff in need of further training
• a regular summary of strengths and weaknesses which can be your action plan
• An effective deterrent against dishonesty, poor service or bad practice
• a way of identifying branches which are under-performing

We offer an accurate, reliable and inexpensive method of quality control which provides you with a means of identifying both good customer service (which can be rewarded) and the not-so-good (which can be performance managed).

Our mystery shopping strategy gives us a deeper understanding of your organization, employees and customers in order to be able to provide you with a full scale picture of how the action of one affect the other and of course your business. Our services are tailored to meet the needs of your business while specifically targeting your pain point areas. Below are some of the services we offer:

• We provide periodic reports and statistics to enable you to track customer service performance.
• We monitor your customer service by visiting nominated outlets at an agreed frequency.
• We extend your quality assurance program to the intangible elements of your customer service.
• We look at your business through the eyes of your customers.
• We ensure all your branches are giving a consistent level of customer service.
• We spot any employees who may be driving your customers away and advice on corrective measures.
• We benchmark services provided by branches against your customer service standards.
• We confirm and advice staff level of product knowledge and customer service standard.
• We check that advice and information your employees are giving is accurate and conforms to any legal guidelines which may apply.
• We benchmark your service against that offered by your competitors.

Our reports will provide a summary findings (and presentations if required) which will enable you to track the effect of product changes as well as customer service and staff training needs. They will enable you to compare the performance of each outlet and reward those which demonstrate better customer service attitude than others. This is especially important where such incentive programs may encourage staff to improve quickly and tip the customer satisfaction index up north.

There are several types of Mystery Shopping. The most common is where agents visit a client's branch to make an evaluation. Another type is where agents report on a client's telephone response in a variety of situations such as a call from a prospective customer or to a telephone complaint. Methodologies include usage of hidden video and audio equipment. Telephone shopping entails obtaining information through a phone call to customer service centers, call centers or any venue in which an exchange from the business to the customer occurs over the phone. Other types of methodologies can include online surveys and how aggrieved customers are handled in certain scenarios such as account closure or fraudulent transaction complaint.

WHY MYSTERY SHOPPING?
Organizations spend big marketing money to get new customers in the door, but sometimes pay less attention to what happens when these customers come walking through the door. Mystery shoppers give you the advantage of a unique form of feedback to assess customer satisfaction as well as high quality data on staff behavior, customer service standard, product knowledge and others. It will give you the hard data which is often needed to manage your business and your customers.

From Business perspective:

• Does the customer facing staff recommend the bank's products properly to the customers
• Are the product offerings properly and prominently displayed
• How do the branches benchmark against competition
• What does competition do well that you could copy
• How many of your product leaflets are on display in your branches and what is the consistency
• Are your support vendors meeting your agreed service standards, or are they letting you down
• Which of your branches offers the best customer service and which is the worst
• How did last quarter's service measures compare with this quarter
• Is there a customer service target, how are the branches doing comparatively, is there a shortfall
• How is the contact centre performing vis-a-vis customer satisfaction, How engaged are they

From the customer's perspective

• How the service they received compared with the service they expected
• How much they trust you and your product
• How your customer service compares with that of your competitors
• How much loyalty they feel towards you as a result of their last transaction
• How much they feel you value them as a customer
• How much they feel they are treated like an individual person

OBJECTIVES AND GOAL SETTING:
The first step an organization needs to take when implementing a mystery shopping program is to determine why they are interested in having mystery shoppers visit the business. What kinds of issues do they want to address? Is there a specific concern about customer size and transaction volume or has the organization been receiving a number of complaints about the same kind of issues? While most mystery shopping programs are about measuring customer service, there are a range of other possible objectives including:

• Compliance - are your staff complying with legal requirements
• Standards - are your staff following organization's standards, policies and procedures
• Incentives - identifying staff deserving of reward
• Benchmarking - we can benchmark you against competition; by service and by product
• Customer satisfaction - what is the quality of service and product being rendered to you customers
• Customer loyalty- are you staff creating the atmosphere for repeated business
• Training needs and effectiveness - identifying weaknesses in the service chain which may indicate a training need, and confirm afterwards how effective the training has been
• Continuous Improvement - techniques which provide you with an ideal basis for helping every branch or every staff member to strive towards excellence
• Overall customer experience - knowing how your customer feel about the organization and its offerings
• Staff friendliness and engagement skills - developing a strategy that promotes staff/customer friendliness and engagement coefficient
• Sales & service processes - are your staff grounded in the policies and procedures of your organization

A mystery shopping report is only useful if a business asks the right questions and whatever the answers to these questions are, they must be something the company can act on once it receives the information. Preparing the right questions and agreeing on what to observe will enhance the acceptability of the result of the exercise, hence once employees are made aware of the results, tendency to dispute some details about the visit or the shopper's findings will be minimized. The ultimate goal to using mystery shoppers to gather information when they visit a particular location is to improve the customers' experience when they visit the business.

Also to be fair and above board, employees should be told that the organization intends to use mystery shoppers to gauge how they conduct themselves when dealing with customers.

Owners and managers can't be everywhere at once to keep a close eye on how well employees are performing their duties.

Getting an impression from a neutral third party is a great way to evaluate whether the organization's training programs have been effective as far as product knowledge and customer service practices are concerned. Keep in mind that the vast majority of customers who are dissatisfied after visiting a business don't take the time to communicate their dissatisfaction to anyone. They just quietly take their business elsewhere.

Once the organization has a clear idea of where it is and what goals it wants to achieve going forward, we can work with you to develop a clear plan for all issues requiring a redress using the mystery shopper's approach.

THE BENEFITS:
Research shows that it is the quality of human interaction which has the greatest effect on customers' perception of an organization. Therefore where there is a thin line between competing products or services, quality customer service delivery can give your organization the competitive edge.

High customer service standards enable many firms to charge a premium for their products. Yet in many ways, good customer service can be at no cost or minimal cost to an organization. Therefore, improved customer service is a simple and affordable route to increased profitability.

Repeat business is another key profit enabler. It comes from ensuring customers are genuinely and completely satisfied with, and preferably pleasantly surprised by the quality of your product. Repeat business save unnecessary expenditure on advertising and promotion to attract new customers.

Therefore, understanding your customer and his/her experience with your organization - whether in-person, via your contact centre is essential in targeting new business and retaining current customers. Using our mystery shopping services can help you achieve high customer service standards, repeat business and also identify other key areas needing improvement, and then implementing a success strategy based on our actionable recommendations. Our programs will help see improved employee performance, increased loyalty and retention rates culminating in maximized profitability.

It is the employees who brings the brand alive, hence it is imperative that their sales and service behaviors be aligned with the brand promise. Actions speak louder than words. Organizations spend millions of Naira on external communications to define an emotional connection with the customer. However, when a customer perceives a disconnect between an employee representing the brand and external communications, a certain level of ambiguity creeps into the brand experience. The result severely undermines the investments, not only for the customer in question, but their entire social network.

In today's increasingly connected world, one bad experience could be shared with hundreds if not thousands of friends via social networks times over. Mystery shopping is an excellent tool to align sales and service behaviors to the brand. Mystery shopping programs, when administered properly helps identify the sales and service behaviors that matter most - those which drive purchase intent and customer loyalty.

OUR STRATEGY: Call²Action™
Our strategy is to have an understanding of the organization's desired result; each engagement is tailored to the organization's unique corporate objectives. We then build the call to action elements which are designed to identify key sales, customer engagement and service behaviors which will correlate to a desired customer experience outcome. These key drivers are determined as a result of the relationship between specific behaviors and a desired outcome. This approach helps identify and reinforce sales and service behaviors which drive repeat business or loyalty - behaviors that matter.



The approach will help identify employees in need of coaching and processes that needs improvement. It will also create event-triggered reports that should identify employees who failed to perform targeted/specific behaviors. For example, if it is important to track cross- and up-selling attempts in a mystery shop exercise, a Coaching Report will be designed to flag any employees who failed to cross- or up-sell. This report can then be used to identify which employees are in need of coaching with respect to these key behaviors - behaviors that matter

Call²Action™ is automated, so you can have hardcopy report and access to our systems where your report reside on our SQL database for as long as you are our client. This allows you to tweak the data to get other flavors of report/information based on available data that you have access to. Our Mystery Shopping staff are equipped with solutions that helps them send in the data in real time, this way they won't forget what they have experienced. And we can generate reports online real time for you or give you real time access.