News: Articles of Interest

Getting the Best Out Of a Mystery Shopping Program

If you are planning to run a mystery shopping program to find out the strengths and weaknesses of your service-providing franchise, there are certain things you will need to consider before proceeding with the plan.

To begin with, you need to decide exactly what information you will collect from the program, how you will utilize it in a way that will be beneficial for your company, and how much you are willing to pay for it. You also need to alert your employees about the fact that you are going to employ a mystery shopping program - this will not only mentally prepare them for the evaluation, but also help them to stay on their toes and perform at their best.

Once you have got that over with, let's go in a bit deeper - how do you want your mystery shopping program to be executed? Through telephone calls? Personal visits? Online evaluations through email and website visits? Some or all of the above? It's all up to you. You also need to plan the schedule of the program.

Finally, the most important part - exactly which demographic segment is your mystery shopper going to represent? In order to determine the attitude of your franchise toward different demographic groups, your mystery shopper will need to portray particular roles suited to them. This will help you to understand how well-prepared (or unprepared) you are as a service provider.

Now to find a good provider for the mystery shopping service - Your provider needs to be well-experienced in this field, yet malleable and quick enough in terms of understanding and responding to your distinct requirements. Your provider's time management skills should be impeccable. The mystery shopping Ôagents' themselves should be well-trained in order to ensure accuracy of the information they collect, and rigorously monitored for consistency of quality. You also must make sure that they possess coverage of professional liability in case the program results in legal action being taken as an aftermath of the program.

You may want to set your sights upon a provider which offers a simple internet-based mystery shopping program. This will help you to keep administrative pressure at a minimum, and give you a massive host of easily customizable options for your program. However, many companies still prefer to use fax, messenger services or "snail mail" for delivering the results for the sake of security, but since the information is rarely of sensitive nature, this may be rather unnecessary.

You also must check if your provider offers additional services on a complimentary and customizable basis - this may include analysis of your competition, comment cards (online or traditional), exit interview programs, surveys, telephone-based analysis services etc... Although they are not part of the core service per se, they nonetheless offer more views into the minds of your customers.

Last but not least, your provider should keep your company under a certain degree of pressure to improve its quality of service at all times. They can do this by steepening their grading criteria, expanding their techniques of evaluation or simply by demanding better service altogether. This will greatly help your organization in the long run.

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