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.
Courtesy of ArticleSnatch.com
By Tamra Sawyer
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