Many industries are closely regulated, and so it’s very important for employees to follow the rules and avoid any legal violations. For example, retail stores that sell tobacco or alcohol are not permitted to sell those items to anyone under the age of 21, and doing so can result in fines and other steep penalties. In banking and insurance, certain disclosures must be made depending on the type of product being sold, and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) must be protected. This even applies to dining, as certain levels of cleanliness must be upheld, lest diners actually get sick.
Most businesses employ regular and repeated training and testing to ensure compliance. This is a good start. But how can you confirm that training has worked for your staff? No business owner or manager wants to find out an employee has been making these kinds of mistakes when an official auditor drops by with a fine. Naturally, you must be wondering whether mystery shopping can help. But aren’t mystery shoppers simply average consumers without any special compliance training for your industry?
You bet. Mystery shoppers are indeed recruited from the regular pool of customers who might frequent your business anyway, and it’s highly unlikely they’ve had training in your industry’s regulations. But that’s perfectly fine because the way we’ll check your employees for compliance is with a carefully designed survey.
At The Brandt Group, we start with a customer-service foundation when we begin crafting your mystery-shopping program. However, we also customize your survey to include questions that are specific to either your particular business or to your broader industry. Typically, a restaurant would see several questions regarding the atmosphere (such as temperature, background music, and overall comfort), whereas a bank might focus on professional greetings and attire. Thus, to test compliance, we would simply add more questions that target your concerns—and update those as your needs change.
If you were operating a convenience store and wanted to make sure your employees aren’t failing to check ID when appropriate, we would actually ask our shopper to attempt to buy an age-restricted product and see what the cashier does. (We could even ask the shopper to claim he or she forgot to bring identification just to see how the employee handles that!) Similarly, we would ask a shopper to carefully observe cleanliness with regard to a restaurant. And while he or she won’t be able to visit your restaurant’s kitchen, the state of the dining area, bathrooms, and trash receptacles will tell you a lot about how seriously everyone is taking cleanliness. And at a bank? Well, we would make sure your loan officers are handing out the appropriate brochures, and that your tellers are checking identification before looking up account information.
As we often stress, mystery shopping is not designed to get employees in trouble. It’s meant to be used as a tool by management to train them to be better. Employees have to represent your company well in order to support your business’s reputation, not hurt it, so this is critical. Don’t let ignorance or negligence undermine everything you’ve built your business up to be. And while we hope you have full faith in your staff, let us never forget this adage: trust, but verify.
Reach out today, and together we’ll design a mystery shopping program that will not only improve your customer service and suggestive selling but will also help you keep your business fully compliant with the regulators.
