Mystery Shop Tips
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Whether your business is a service businesses, a product production business or any other kind of business you can think of, you have customers. These customers may be any place on the supply chain. Someone has interaction with your employees and your services or products. How do you know if the experience of your users is worth the price, the effort and the hassle? You do a mystery shop. However, depending on how you handle it, a mystery shop may or may not give you the information you need to make improvements. Here are a couple of ideas to help make your more valuable.
First of all, decide up front what you are hoping to discover. One mystery shop cannot tell you everything about everything. If you try to collect too much information, you will not be able to process it, make sense of it, or take action on it. If you have not used the mystery shop before, then focus on one very narrow portion of the interaction. If you run a self storage property and have never done a mystery shop of your property, you might have someone visit your property just to see if the curb appeal and cleanliness is up to par and if the staff people are friendly and inviting. This seems like a simplistic mission for a mystery shop, but it is enough information to start. This would enable your staffers to work on two simple things, curb appeal and cleanliness and being friendly and inviting.
You also need to make sure that you have a straightforward method of judging the mystery shop. For instance you might rate the curb appeal on the freshness of the paint, absence of litter, cleanliness of the front windows and door handle, cleanliness of the carpet, counter and show room area. You might rate friendliness by how long it took to get eye contact and a smile. If you are not specific about what is being judged on a mystery shop and what levels of attainment are unacceptable, acceptable, very good or excellent, then your staff people will not know how to pass a mystery shop and will never be able to satisfy you.
If you set up your mystery shop so it is ambiguous or so that no one knows what has to be done to get an excellent rating, then the mystery shop becomes a de-motivator and a disincentive. Many companies create lots of initiatives that backfire. If your first attempts at using the mystery shop backfire on you, it will be very hard to reestablish a mystery shop program.
The last tip is to be sure you give the feedback on the quickly. The longer you wait the less effective the feedback will be and the less action a feedback will create. If you tell your staffer that last month on the second, there was litter piled up in the corner in front of the building, you will get little action and little behavior change. Your staffer will probably shrug the shoulders and carry on with whatever he or she was doing. If, on the other hand, you tell your staffer that there was trash piled up in the corner in front of the building yesterday and you are not happy about it, your staffer will probably get outside and get on litter patrol right away and keep up with litter control for a week.
And if you need help in getting your mystery shop program going, whether it is a telephone mystery shop or an in-person mystery shop, you are in the right blog.
Disclamer: This entry is intended to promote our partner StorageMart and some or all participants received compensation.
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