You’ve made the decision to start mystery shopping your company, and now your first reports have arrived. Perhaps they’re a mixed bag: some did great, others so-so, and a few poorly. How should you, or those employees’ manager, use this data to instruct them?
Reinforce
When discussing what went well in a mystery shop, managers should consider reviewing these reports with all of the employees—at once, if possible. Regular team meetings are a great way to build rapport and strengthen your company’s culture, and these events present great opportunities for discussing all of the best work your people are doing.
Now would also be an ideal time recognize the employees who’ve done well, offering a shout-out or some other kind of incentive for their faithful work. Praising employees engenders a positive atmosphere, and it gives the other employees something to strive for.
Reproach
However, singling out individual employees for poor scores is not a healthy team-building exercise, as it will ostracize and embarrass them. There is a myriad of reasons for why employees get bad scores on mystery shops: perhaps it was an off-day, or perhaps they weren’t sufficiently trained on your customer-service or sales processes. When managers speak publicly about these failings, they should do so broadly, without naming names, saying that the whole company has to get better at offering the best customer experience possible.
Instead of shining the spotlight on employees who received poor marks, managers would do better to pull those employees aside for one-on-one discussions. They should listen to the employees’ points-of-view on the reports to understand the situation with as much information as possible. Do they acknowledge their errors? Do they make excuses? Do they get defensive? Do they commit to do better next time? —How your employees react will prove instructive for you as you consider how to train them better.
Reiterate
If your business has yet to create a workflow or some other kind of visual aid for your customer-service and sales processes, you should do so without delay. When you have it, you’ll find it so much easier to explain your mystery shops to your employees, highlighting the links between the different shopper observations and how they relate to your company’s cultural goals. At The Brandt Group, we’re strong proponents of the GUEST structure (Greet, Understand, Explain, Secure, and Thank), and it’s likely your business has a similar flowchart that’s customized to how you work. (A restaurant might alter this to say Serve instead of Secure, for example.)
Once you’ve used your first round of shops to educate or reward your staff, you must also repeat your tests to see how your training has influenced them. Did the employees who did well the first time keep up the pace? How about the ones with the weaker scores: did they improve on what they committed to work on?
Remember, mystery shopping is an ongoing process, a customer-service and product-quality evaluation tool that you should use again and again to keep everyone sharp. Keep bad habits at bay, introduce new sales initiatives, modify your merchandising, and create employee incentive structures with this tool to keep your business healthy and profitable for years to come.
If you haven’t already started with us, The Brandt Group would love the opportunity to work with your business to develop the best customer experience possible, with the kind of atmosphere where employees love to work and customers love to shop. Please feel free to review our services, which include on-site and over-the-phone mystery shops, and drop us a line here.
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