Measuring Client Satisfaction

The word mystery shop can make one wonder if there are shops that will have some mysteries to be unraveled by its visitors. Well, it is nothing like that. When a firm appoints an agent to visit its retail outlets or portable storage office secretively to assess the buyer satisfaction out there, the agent is said to shop in that outlet secretly, as he poses like a regular buyer to get first hand experience of the quality of buyer satisfaction that one can get in that outlet. He then evaluates the findings, makes reports based on them and furnishes the information to the management of the firm for further action.

The purpose of appointing agents to mystery shop is to retain the maximum number of old clients and attract new ones. The success of a business is determined by the strength of its client base. Earlier the complaints of the end users and clients were taken in the form of written feedbacks. The unsatisfied clients would leave the premises of the retail outlet disgusted. They did not have the patience or the time to fill in the complaint forms. Hence this method of taking customer feedback turned out to be a failure. Employing agents to get a firsthand experience of the satisfactory and dissatisfactory aspects of the clients is a much better option.

The agents are instructed by the firms to mystery shop for the non tangible issues of client satisfaction as the tangible elements like delivering whatever was promised is not very difficult to gauge. The intangible factors are the ones that are going to affect the client impression and satisfaction. Hence they are more important. There are many intangible factors. The clients tend to compare the level of their actual satisfaction to the level of the satisfaction they expected. Another intangible factor is the degree to which the clients trust the products and the facilities offered by the firm.

The clients are the makers or breakers of the career of a firm. Nowadays there are too many firms vying with each other to satisfy their clients. The clients have a tendency to compare the satisfaction that they get from one firm with that they get from another firm. The agent appointed by a firm to mystery shop finds out the degree of client satisfaction of individual clients by interviewing each and every one of them. He also senses the degree to which a client under consideration is satisfied and if he has developed any loyalty to the firm or its products and amenities. He also observes very finely if the extent to which the clients feel they are being respected and their needs are being attended to well by the staff that they interact with. Each and every buyer likes to be regarded as a unique person with creative tastes. Hence every buyer expects to be paid special attention however common it may be in reality.

The agent whose sole purpose of visiting a retail outlet is to mystery shop for his firm, checks other factors also apart from client satisfaction. He is entrusted with the responsibility to see if the staff is following the legal guidelines conveyed to them by their employing authorities. The next most vital thing that they check is that if the salespersons of the firm are being honest in every step of the transaction. The salesperson is supposed to give accurate information about a product or a feature to his client. He should not suppress any relevant information or use dishonesty to make a sale.

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Disclamer: This entry is intended to promote our partner StorageMart and some or all participants received compensation.

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