Support EXP -
A First Class Mystery Shopping Company
Table of Contents
Key Takeaways:
- Support EXP’s first-class mystery shopping program builds skills and improves frontline performance by equipping your own customers to evaluate their experiences across all channels.
- By addressing service gaps, meeting customer expectations, and enhancing communication and employee performance, financial institutions use Support EXP mystery shopping to foster stronger connections with their customers, leading to increased customer loyalty and business growth.
- A well-designed and properly implemented mystery shopping program provides a proven and sophisticated process of leveraging the Voice of Your Customers to ensure that employee service and sales skills are learned, put into practice, and ingrained, reflecting true cultural transformation.
Introduction
Mystery shopping, done well, promotes customer-centric service that can differentiate an organization. A first-class mystery shopping company like Support EXP can help financial institutions understand customer experiences from an unbiased perspective.
These FIs can then improve the skills of those on the front lines to better meet the expectations of their customers, fostering stronger relationships and engendering trust and loyalty.
Benefits of Mystery Shopping
Data Collection via Customer Journey
Mystery shopping provides valuable data by employing discreet, trained evaluators to interact with a business. As they navigate through the customer journey, mystery shoppers assess critical touchpoints such as website usability, product displays, staff engagement, service efficiency, and complaint handling.
By blending seamlessly into the customer base, mystery shoppers gather objective and real-time feedback, offering businesses an invaluable perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of their operations.
This data-driven approach allows companies to make informed decisions, optimize processes, and enhance overall customer satisfaction, ensuring that every step of the customer journey aligns with their brand’s vision and objectives.
Evaluation of the Customer Journey
Mystery shoppers are given specific criteria and guidelines to observe and assess various touchpoints along the customer journey. Starting from the initial point of contact, such as the website or physical store entrance, they evaluate factors like the cleanliness of the premises, employee greeting, and overall ambiance.
As they progress through the customer journey, they observe product availability, staff knowledge, customer service quality, and how effectively upselling or cross-selling is done. Mystery shoppers pay attention to waiting times, queue management, and the checkout process.
Post-purchase, they may assess follow-up procedures, return policies, and the overall impression of their experience. This data provides valuable insights, enabling the organization to identify areas for improvement, enhance customer satisfaction, and optimize the entire customer journey.
Identify Gaps in Employee Training
Mystery shopping is a powerful tool for identifying gaps in employee training by simulating real customer interactions. Through this covert evaluation, mystery shoppers can assess how well employees demonstrate the skills and knowledge acquired during training.
They observe if employees are able to effectively handle customer inquiries, provide accurate information, and deliver exceptional customer service. Any discrepancies between the expected performance and the actual experience during mystery shopping highlight areas where employees may need further training or development. For example, if mystery shoppers encounter instances of poor product knowledge or unprofessional behavior, it signals potential gaps in training programs.
By capturing these insights, businesses can tailor their training initiatives to address specific weaknesses, ensuring employees are adequately prepared to meet customer expectations and enhance the overall customer experience.
Identify Areas of Improvement in Your Digital Experience
Mystery shopping plays a crucial role in identifying areas of improvement in a bank’s digital experience by leveraging trained evaluators who closely interact with the bank’s digital platforms.
These mystery shoppers conduct realistic simulations of customer journeys, exploring the bank’s website, mobile app, and online services. They assess the user-friendliness, efficiency, and effectiveness of each platform, paying attention to elements such as website navigation, mobile app functionality, online customer service responsiveness, and the overall ease of conducting transactions.
By observing real-time interactions, mystery shoppers uncover potential pain points, usability issues, and areas where the digital experience may fall short of customer expectations.
The data collected through mystery shopping provides invaluable insights, allowing the bank to pinpoint specific weaknesses and make data-driven decisions for enhancing their digital channels, ultimately delivering a seamless and satisfying customer experience.
What to Look For in Mystery Shopping Companies?
When a financial institution is considering hiring a mystery shopping company to assess its customer service and overall performance, several key factors should be taken into consideration. A poorly designed or implemented mystery shopping program can prove to be a wasted investment.
Here is a list of features a bank or credit union should look for in a first-class mystery shopping company:
1. Experience and Expertise
2. Customization
3. Range of Services
4. Pool of Mystery Shoppers
5. Training and Guidelines
6. Data Accuracy and Validation
7. Reporting and Analytics
8. Compliance and Ethics
9. Reputation and References
10. Cost-Effectiveness
By carefully evaluating these factors, a financial institution can select a reputable mystery shopping company that aligns with its goals and helps improve customer service, employee performance, and overall customer satisfaction.
How Do Our Mystery Shoppers Work?
Other mystery shopping programs employ independent shoppers or even use untrained people from their own organization. Support EXP has an entire shopper engagement team that will invite, recruit, equip, train, coach, and develop your own customers to evaluate a real service experience based on the SERVQUAL dimensions of customer service and your own identified service standards.
Support EXP provides your customers with training resources, including an online Shopper Handbook, to prepare them to look for certain service behaviors while hiding their identity as an evaluator. A very engaged and educated customer evaluator pool is built and sustained.
Support EXP takes real customers and equips them, engages them and trains them to identify what their experience should sound like, look like, feel like. Then, the questions they answer are on specific, observable behaviors. That is key to the actionable feedback Support EXP’s clients receive: observable behaviors, not just impressions.
When these evaluators are deployed, they are not asked to score on a 1 to 5 scale. They are asked, what was your degree of satisfaction? And did you or did you not observe these particular behaviors?
None of the evaluators is subjective or ends up with some subjectivity to give a two or a one or a five. That is all determined, and that whole rating comes from the system that is calibrating the degree of satisfaction on each behavior and then providing the score.
Other mystery shop providers are putting the onus on the evaluators to come up with a number and a score. Support EXP handles that through the calibration of the data and the responses.
How Mystery Shopping Improves Customer Relationships
https://supportexp.com/solutions/customer-cx-mystery-shop-platform/
Mystery shopping can improve customer relationships in many ways. Mystery shopping helps businesses adopt a customer-centric approach by providing valuable insights into the customer experience. By understanding their customers’ perspective and pain points, businesses can make informed decisions to enhance their offerings and service.
Through mystery shopping evaluations, businesses can identify gaps in their customer service delivery. This data helps them recognize areas where employees might be falling short in meeting customer needs, allowing for targeted improvements.
Armed with the feedback from mystery shopping reports, businesses can implement targeted training and coaching programs to enhance the quality of customer service. This, in turn, leads to better customer interactions and relationships.
Mystery shopping helps businesses understand whether their offerings meet customer expectations. By addressing any discrepancies between customer expectations and actual experiences, businesses can build more trust with their clientele.
Mystery shopping can also highlight communication issues, both among employees and with customers. By improving communication, businesses can avoid misunderstandings and foster better relationships with their customers.
Mystery shopping provides an objective assessment of employee performance during customer interactions. By recognizing and rewarding excellent service, businesses can incentivize employees to maintain positive relationships with customers.
Mystery shoppers can evaluate how effectively employees identify and present upselling opportunities. By doing so in a customer-friendly manner, businesses can increase revenue while maintaining positive customer relationships. Similarly, mystery shopping can reveal how well employees handle customer complaints or concerns. By addressing any deficiencies in complaint resolution, businesses can strengthen their ability to turn negative experiences into positive ones.
Consistency is crucial in building strong customer relationships. Mystery shopping enables businesses to assess whether their customer service standards are consistently met across different locations and employees.
Finally, regular mystery shopping assessments allow businesses to track their progress in improving customer relationships over time. By analyzing trends and feedback, they can continuously refine their strategies to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
Ways That Mystery Shopping Improves Employee Training
https://supportexp.com/solutions/customer-cx-mystery-shop-platform/employee-training/
Mystery shopping can significantly improve employee training in many ways. Mystery shopping helps identify training needs by providing real-world feedback on employee performance during customer interactions.
By analyzing mystery shopping reports, businesses can identify specific areas where employees may need additional training or development. These areas could include product knowledge, customer service skills, handling complaints, upselling, or adherence to company policies and procedures.
Mystery shopping allows businesses to establish clear performance standards and expectations for their employees. By defining what constitutes excellent customer service and comparing it to actual experiences, organizations can set benchmarks for their staff to meet or exceed.
Unbiased and objective feedback from objective evaluators helps employees understand how their performance is perceived by real customers without fear of reprisal or bias from managers. The data gathered is used as a constructive coaching tool rather than a disciplinary measure.
With insights from mystery shopping reports, businesses can develop targeted training programs that address specific areas of improvement. Training sessions can be customized to focus on the most critical aspects of the customer experience, making the training more relevant and effective.
Mystery shopping programs can be used as a positive reinforcement tool. When employees receive positive feedback from mystery shoppers for their exceptional service, it boosts their morale and motivates them to maintain high-quality interactions with customers.
On the flip side, if employees receive feedback about areas where they need improvement, mystery shopping data can be used as a basis for corrective action. Employees can be provided with specific feedback and coaching to help them address any performance gaps.
Over time, by conducting regular mystery shopping evaluations, businesses can track the progress of their employees’ performance. This ongoing assessment allows them to measure the effectiveness of training initiatives and identify any recurring issues that need to be addressed.
Mystery shopping can help reinforce the company’s customer-centric culture and values. By evaluating how well employees embody these values during customer interactions, businesses can ensure consistency in delivering the desired customer experience.
Using Mystery Shopping to Improve Digital Brand Experiences
https://supportexp.com/solutions/customer-cx-mystery-shop-platform/digital-banking-shops/
In recent years, digital channels have become the channel of choice for banking customers. With the forced shift to digital channels at the onset of the COVID pandemic, many customers discovered the convenience of online or mobile banking, and now rely on it for day-to-day transactions.
Mystery shopping can be adapted to improve digital brand experiences in a number of ways:
1. Website Evaluation
2. Mobile App Assessment
3. Online Customer Service
4. Social Media Presence
5. Omnichannel Experience
6. Checkout Process Evaluation
7. Virtual Shopping Experience
8. Brand Reputation Online
9. Competitor Analysis
To instill customer loyalty that leads to retained, repeated and referred business, a financial institution must design and deliver frontline execution that meets its customers’ expectations. Insights from customer feedback analytics should promote frontline execution at a level that makes your organization stand out from the competition, with every experience, every customer, every time.
Support EXP has innovated a proven mystery shopping program for helping financial institutions of all sizes improve their frontline performance management to achieve the bottom-line results they want most.
Want to see how a first-class mystery shopping program can make a difference in both your frontline service and bottom-line results? Schedule a conversation with one of our analysts today!
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