Mystery Shopping As A Quality Assurance Tool
Courtesy of ArticleSnatch.com
By Tamra Sawyer
Quality assurance in service industry is a tough task. Quality
is considered good if end product or service meets the set specifications.
But determining the specifications in case of service is tedious.
This is because the expectations and aspirations of different
customers are different. Whereas one customer may like the service
of a company, the other may not because of variation in their
expectation levels. Also, there is no equipment to measure the
quality of services. Therefore, the service industry has to depend
on feedback of customers and mystery shoppers to judge their quality.
Mystery shopping is a quite powerful quality assurance tool.
It helps a company get a true and straightforward feedback. Mystery
shoppers are sent by companies to field to judge the level of
their quality. A mystery shopper poses as a regular customer to
find out how the regular customers are treated by the company.
Some Of The Areas Where Quality Is Improved With The Help Of
Mystery Shoppers Are:
Customer Service
Customer is the king. Companies cannot afford to disappoint them.
Therefore, most of the mystery shopping assignments are meant
to rate the customer service levels of companies. There are several
ways through which a secret shopper decides how customer friendly
a company is. For example,
He may go to a shop to return back the merchandise he has bought
a few days back. This will help to know how the company deals
with customers who come to them for exchanging the merchandise.
He may ask a salesman to help him find the right outfit for an
occasion. This will help to know how helpful the sales staff is
and if it has good knowledge about latest trends. He may check
how swift the billing staff is and how they handle customers when
there are long queues.
Facilities
Nowadays, customers want much more. People do not rate a shop
based on the quality of products they sell but on its ambience,
which includes its interior, lighting, and music. A mystery shopper
thoroughly checks the facilities. He checks several things, such
as the type of music played by the shop, whether the music is
too loud, how clean the washrooms are, and if the shop is properly
lit. All feedback received from the mystery shopper is used by
the company in its quality assurance pursuit.
Staff Productivity
Companies employ mystery shoppers to check how productive their
staff is. It is very difficult for companies to keep track of
all their employees; therefore, they employ mystery shoppers to
know about the same. This type of check is usually performed on
sales and customer service staff that deal directly with customers.
For example, a mystery shopper may not actually go to the field
but may call the staff to check how it responds to his queries.
These types of checks are important, as most people contact companies
first over phone. If the first experience is bad, then customers
may lose interest in the company. As success of a company, to
a large extent, depends on its employees, checking the efficiency
of staff is important.
From the above discussion, it is clear that mystery shopping
is quite useful to the service industry in quality assurance.
Many important business management decisions are made based on
the observations of such assignments.
