The Brandt Group specializes in co-developing with you your business’s customer experience, which is done by tailoring a thoughtful customer service with quality salesmanship and branding. Focusing on these facets will ensure long-term customer loyalty and enhanced profits, which will propel your business into years of long-term success. To accomplish this, we offer many important services, including leadership training, market analysis, satisfaction surveys, and more.
But our most powerful tool is mystery shopping, whereby we measure how your business performs in practice and not just in theory. Your bookkeeper can tell you whether you’re making or losing money, for example; mystery shopping’s real power is that it can tell you why.
You’ve undoubtedly heard of mystery shopping, but let’s define it nevertheless: we work with average consumers in and around your business who then enter your locations and interact with your employees. They observe everything from cleanliness to layout, customer service to product selection, all the while portraying themselves as regular customers. When they finish, they complete an electronic survey filled with the questions you want answers to the most, supplying you with the kind of critical feedback with which you can take action.
But how do mystery shoppers score the surveys? How do they decide what matters most? That’s a common question we get when onboarding new clients, so let’s take a moment to clarify how that works. As it turns out, The Brandt Group doesn’t actually permit the shoppers to score your surveys at all. In other words, they don’t score you. You do.
Wait, what?
Shoppers only see questions, not what those questions are worth. For example, they would see a question like, “Were you greeted within 30 seconds of entering the store?”, and only have to worry about answering Yes or No. But our survey software knows whether you’re emphasizing customer-acknowledgment in your employee training, so it knows how valuable that question should be.
Why do it this way? Well, by having shoppers focus on their observations (what happened, how long did it take) and their opinions (did you like this, what would you change), they can give you unadulterated feedback without having to complicate that with scorekeeping. Instead, we work with you, our client, to determine how the scoring works.
This system also gives us a lot of flexibility. Why is that important? Well, as you mystery shop in the long-term, you will start to identify trends. Perhaps the shop reports indicate that your salespeople keep forgetting to mention an important extended warranty. Not only is that warranty valuable to your business because it equates to additional revenue, it’s also valuable to the customers who would want to at least know they have the option to buy ‘peace of mind.’
Offering that warranty means more profit and a better customer experience. So, what can you do about this? You contact us saying you need to put a special emphasis on that question, which we can do by using our adaptable survey system. Per your instruction, we increase that question’s point value so that it really impacts the final score on future reports.
When you use your mystery shops for training, that newly emphasized question will really stand out. Plus, if you offer an incentive for achieving high scores, employees will feel even more compelled to make sure they remember to offer that extended warranty.
At the end of the day, your mystery-shopping program is just that—yours. You decide what questions you need answers to, and you also decide which questions matter the most among those. Given our nearly 30-years of experience in this business, we have a lot of great advice we can give you, but you’ll be the one who gets to make all the final decisions.
So, why don’t we get started? Why don’t you reach out to us, and let’s have a conversation about how your business is doing and what you hope to accomplish in the future? Together, we’ll brainstorm a great solution that will help you to measure your overall customer experience and take the necessary steps to correct the bad trends and reward the good ones. It’s time you start getting the answers to why parts of your business work or don’t; it’s time to take control using the critical information only mystery shopping can deliver.
