As I mentioned in the previous Lesson, reasons for the ineffectiveness of traditional mystery shopping programs fall into two categories: flaws inherent in the mystery shop program itself, and failures in the program’s implementation. In this Lesson, we’ll look at the latter, to discover errors that can derail even the most soundly designed mystery shopping initiative. You’ll see that many of them stem from organizational disconnect or failure to follow through with appropriate action on the mystery shopping feedback data. Consider yourself warned: these mistakes can render your efforts a waste of time and resources!
1) Insufficient Executive Buy-In —
Simply stated, a lack of executive buy-in creates an uphill battle for those leading the teams that need to execute the executives’ strategy. Executives must be wholly invested in the value of the initiative from the very beginning — and support that initiative in both their words and actions. Having the CEO and other senior executives leading the drive behind the CX mystery shopping research project ensures it will be embraced and attended to with great diligence, care and concern throughout the organization.
2) Poorly Onboarded Managers —
While a mystery shopping initiative is, ideally, led by senior executives, it’s the managers who will be called upon to handle the concerns of the frontline team members. To enlist their support, it is vitally important that they are included as early as possible in the planning and deployment of the mystery shopping initiative. Since trust is always an issue when a mystery shopping research project is undertaken, managers must be fully informed as to the purpose, rationale and scope of the project, as well as what their roles and responsibilities will be to measurably impact changes and improvements in frontline execution. Without effective onboarding, managers are left to “fill in the blanks” on their own and to “wing it” when their employees begin asking questions – resulting in greater levels of mistrust.
3) Lack of Pre-Deployment Communication —
Regardless of whether the message is being delivered by a senior leader or a manager, it is imperative that the mystery shopping initiative be packaged and presented to the frontline staff in the most clear, honest and positive manner possible. Employees naturally want to know WHY this research is being done, HOW it will be done and WHAT will happen as a result. They must understand that the desired outcome is to design and deliver a service experience that meets the needs and expectations of the customers — and that every member of the executive, leadership and management teams is committed to bringing about the changes necessary. Changes that start with building the skills critical to elite frontline execution.
In addition, those within the organization need to understand that the evaluators are customers who are giving their time and effort to provide feedback about their actual experiences with specific channels at the behavioral level to help make the bank or credit union more responsive, frictionless and successful for everyone.
4) Lack of Benchmarking —
To clearly establish the impact a properly implemented mystery shopping program can have, you need to know where you’re starting from — what your service and sales culture currently IS – in concrete, measurable, behavioral terms. Beyond the obvious benefits of measuring performance improvements and calculating ROI, benchmarks also minimize the pushback that inevitably occurs as the data reveals problem areas that need to be acknowledged, repaired and elevated. Human nature being what it is, you can expect instances where the involved parties attempt to explain, deny or defend their behavior with false memories and distortions of the truth. Benchmarking provides an objective record for comparison.
5) Failing to Follow Expert Guidance —
Data alone will not provide you with the outcome you desire. In fact, data alone will most likely confuse and confound your progress. Only when managers and executives are properly enabled to understand, identify and take action on that data is improvement possible. Such enablement comes from the expert guidance and critical practices honed over time by professionals in the field of customer service research. When you follow their guidance, you can build a team of internal talent that can provide an appropriate and effective response to the feedback, equipping frontline team members with the best practices that will ensure their success.
6) Data Dilemmas —
The amount of data generated in a typical mystery shopping research project is VAST — and without the quality control steps we talked about in the previous Lesson, it’s riddled with ERRORS. Neither the raw data nor the analytics generated from that data is easily understood except by the rarest of executives and managers. Misinterpretation of the results leads to decisions and actions that are simply wrong. To make matters worse, there are generally significant delays — weeks or even months — before frontline managers receive the feedback, diminishing its usefulness for coaching purposes.
Easy availability of industry data from outside sources makes it tempting to use such data to draw conclusions about your own organization, but it may just as easily give you an inaccurate picture. For a mystery shopping initiative to work, the data must be collected, verified, compiled, analyzed, interpreted and translated into an action plan by external research professionals who have no hidden agenda and are committed to providing you with the truth and the expert guidance to use it properly.
7) Incentivizing the Wrong Things —
Setting up incentives for CX performance improvement is a powerful thing BUT you have to target the incentives where maximum impact is experienced by the customer and, in that, focus on what is most beneficial to the bank or credit union. For example, offering an incentive for performing perfunctory skills is nonsense. The incentive should be around expanding mission-critical skills, like significantly advancing the sale of additional products and services, and complex skills, like demonstrating genuine empathy and authenticity in a service interaction.
It’s also critical that you incentivize actual PERFORMANCE trending over time instead of simple achievement of a score based a single data point. This places the right emphasis on true behavioral change that has become instinctive and engrained, i.e., the frontline culture has shifted and/or the professional development of an individual performer has changed.
8) Sticking with Stagnant Standardized Training —
Each of your frontline employees has their own strengths and areas for improvement, as do your branches, channels and teams. Effective mystery shopping research pinpoints areas in which to target training. But even with this knowledge, many organizations opt for a standardized, one-size-fits-all training approach and rationalize it as efficiency. Such an approach in fact works against the desired outcome of improved frontline execution. For optimal effectiveness, teaching and reinforcement of critical frontline skills must be dynamic and customized to the needs of the individual employee. Think of it this way: training creates outcomes. If you want the outcome of elite frontline execution, you must modify your training to focus EXACTLY where the data reveals the insufficiency exists – the EXACT behaviors that must be repaired, elevated and optimized.
9) Poorly Equipped & Enabled Managers —
Just as training needs to change, so too must on-the-job coaching provided by managers. Managers are often promoted into their positions without possessing the coaching and development skills they need — and even after they’re promoted, they aren’t trained and empowered with those abilities. The task of equipping and enabling managers with transformative, performance-enhancing coaching techniques is best undertaken by the experts guiding this initiative, who can demonstrate the best way to utilize feedback data to pinpoint areas for improvement and provide guidance on how to effect that change.
10) Lack of Executive Follow-Through —
If, midway through the initiative, the executives’ attention is redirected elsewhere – and there is no end of things begging for your attention – you can expect the level of commitment overall to drop as resources are also redirected. As the mystery shopping research project moves into the action/implementation phase, it is imperative that executives inform and direct their entire management chain that, until their financial institution achieves consistency in the delivery of its brand standards across all channels and holds itself accountable as an organization for that level of performance, they will never truly LIVE their brand. And that undermines the future of the organization.
11) Viewing the Initiative as a Limited EVENT —
Mystery shopping research and performance improvement should be approached as an integral, ongoing part of your operational and financial success. If it is an intermittent or one-time event, the results may not be fully realized, and any outcomes may be only temporary. If your CX initiative is going to be random instead of part of an integrated, continuous process, the value of the program is immediately diminished.
12) Confusing Investment with Expense —
Many institutions tend to treat CX measurement as an expense, rather than an investment that generates returns. But research shows that the customer experience has become THE differentiator for many institutions in an industry that is becoming increasingly commoditized. It’s the experience that makes the difference — and it is the linchpin on which profitability turns. A properly designed and implemented mystery shopping program geared toward improving frontline execution and deepening customer relationships will always demonstrate its ability to pay for itself – and then some!
If you recognize in your own organization any of the mistakes discussed in these past two lessons, don’t blame the research methodology for your lack of expected results. Worse yet, don’t even think about abandoning mystery shopping research in favor of a quicker/cheaper/more popular method. You have the correct solution for behavioral level change – you just need to eliminate the mistakes.
In Conclusion…
What I hope you have taken away from this series of Lessons is that, while there are many research methodologies available for measuring the customer experience, they are NOT INTERCHANGEABLE. Selecting the right measurement tool begins with defining your purpose. If your purpose is to deepen relationships with your customers through best-in-class frontline execution, mystery shopping is the most powerful tool available. Surveys are well suited for measuring the outcome of your customer service delivery. They are useful instruments for capturing your customers’ opinions, gauging customer satisfaction, and informing your strategy. But mystery shopping is the best tool for developing and mastering tactical approaches for achieving your strategic objectives – especially if the objective is strengthening frontline execution.
Despite problems commonly encountered in implementing a typical, traditional mystery shopping program, the need for the actionable feedback provided by a properly designed and properly implemented mystery shopping research program will only increase as customer demand for consistent, best-in-class service grows. And you can bet that it will!
