Mystery Shopping, From CEO to Sales Associate

When you are on your sales floor or property, trying to drive the customer experience, you should always look for the best ways to coach and train your people. Most of the time, it is great to give feedback right after a sale. You can kind of see in the associates eyes that that did everything that you are telling me and they want to go back to my work now. Role-playing sometimes works to see where the problem in their presentation is but that does not give real life situations. 
 
Mystery shopping is one of the best ways to get and give feedback to your associates. This is a great business investment because it allows you to pull up a form and go down the list of things that you would like them to say to the customer. When you determine what they should say, the agent grades them and then sends them to you to go over it with your employees. When they see that print out from the pretend experience, their reactions go straight to bewilderment because they do not believe how the performed. Because of mystery shopping , you now have proof that they are not doing so well at what they say there doing or encouragement that they are doing very well.

In the self storage industry, it is crucial to have this feedback so you can ensure your business is doing as well as it could and to get real life examples to your staff. When you hear recordings of a good mystery shopping agent doing a good job sounding like a real customer, the execution of a simple script is mediocre. You have some people out there who probably do an awesome job each time they pick up the phone. This program challenges you to see what that other half is doing or saying, once that phone is picked up and the conversation begins.

As a property owner, manager, or whatever your title might be, could it hurt you to participate in some sort of behind the scenes program? There have been examples of property managers being shopped in their own mystery shopping program and they did not do so well. The shopping agent opened that managers eyes to have them realize that they have to change their approach to the business. It is very hypocritical for you as a manager to expect your people to provide excellent customer service when you do not. It is as if you are asking your staff to Do as you say, not as you do. In most businesses, that will not fly and may cause more problems than it helps. With mystery shopping , it holds all employees, even managers to the same standard.

Mystery shopping is one of the best ways to track your employees progress and to see how they react to your competition. If you take the information you receive from anonymous shopping and use it to coach your employees effectively, you will succeed. If you choose not to use this program for what it is worth, you are loosing money in more than one way. You loose money because you are paying for a service you are not reaping the benefit from and you could be getting more production out of your staff if they knew what they could do to improve. This experience gives you the best real life examples and gets away from the boredom of role-playing. This program will produce a lift in your business and your profits will grow. What are you waiting for, your competition to get smart and use the service before you?

Miramar Boat Storage

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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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