Tips for an Efficient & Successful Mystery Shopping Program

Written by Support EXP

Table of Contents

Key Takeaways: 

  • The right mystery shopping program can help financial institutions assess their customer service, identify opportunities for improvement, and ensure that service delivery is consistently meeting expectations.
  • Improving the customer experience with a mystery shopping program requires proper analysis of collected data to generate actionable insights about employee behaviors.
  • Performance management is a continuous process of using mystery shopping feedback to inform coaching and training of employees who deliver customer experiences.
  • Operationalizing insights from mystery shopping evaluations throughout your organization will drive positive changes that pay off in greater customer loyalty.

Introduction

To ensure the efficiency and success of your mystery shopping program, it is crucial to follow best practices in its design and deployment. This article outlines some key strategies and techniques for executing an effective mystery shopping program.

Done well, your program will noticeably improve your customer service and elevate your overall performance.

Why Mystery Shopping in a Bank or Credit Union Setting?

The right mystery shopping program gives banks and credit unions valuable insights into their customer experiences. Through detailed assessments at various touchpoints along the customer journey – such as in-person interactions, phone conversations, and online services – feedback from mystery shopping can help the financial institution understand how its customers are being served, identify areas for service improvement, and recognize exceptional employee performance.

Mystery shopping can also be used to assess the effectiveness of sales efforts. It allows institutions to evaluate whether employees are cross-selling relevant products, explaining features and benefits to customers, and providing appropriate recommendations based on customer needs.

An effective mystery shopping program provides reports that banks and credit unions can use to identify specific areas where employees would benefit from additional training or development. This intel helps to address knowledge gaps, improve sales techniques, and enhance overall customer service skills.

A mystery shopping program should serve as a benchmarking tool, allowing banks and credit unions to compare their performance against industry standards and competitors. This information helps them make informed decisions on how to improve and stay competitive.

Consistent and high-quality customer service is crucial for maintaining a positive brand image. Mystery shopping helps banks and credit unions identify any gaps or inconsistencies in service delivery that may harm their brand reputation. By addressing these issues promptly, financial institutions can protect their brand image.

However, because all mystery shopping programs are not created equal – or even administered according to best practices – only an effectively designed program will deliver all of these benefits consistently and effectively.

Key Steps to a Successful & Efficient Mystery Shopping Program

A successful mystery shopping program requires attention to all of the following components:

1. Goals

Clearly identify the goals and objectives of your mystery shopping program. Determine what specific behaviors and skills you want to measure as demonstrated by your frontline employees.

2. Recruiting

Many mystery shopping programs use professional, external mystery shoppers. Others train their own in-house mystery shoppers. Inviting your own customers to be mystery shoppers is particularly useful when the customer base is limited and employees may be able to recognize unfamiliar customers as mystery shoppers. In either case, mystery shoppers should be reliable and detail-oriented, and should have good observational and communication skills.

3. Program Selection

To ensure a successful mystery shopping program, a third-party provider can be a better option than a program designed in-house. Having a partner with the expertise and resources to administer your program can make you more confident that you are getting reliable data, interpreting it correctly, and putting it to optimal use.

4. Reporting & Portal

A structured, easy-to-understand system is essential to collecting and organizing the data from your mystery shoppers. A good data collection and retrieval system will allow you to analyze your feedback to identify trends, patterns, strengths, and areas for improvement.

5. Learning & Findings Implementation

The endgame of your program comes from using your analyzed data to generate actionable insights and recommendations for improvement. Feedback can reveal gaps between customer expectations and service delivery. The best analysis tools will pinpoint exactly where training is needed, and what skills need to be strengthened. Ongoing mystery shopping evaluations will ensure that desired changes are sustained, as your team members achieve mastery of key service skills.

Setting Mystery Shopping Goals & Benchmarks

What Are Key Goals for Mystery Shopping?

The primary goals of mystery shopping focus on improving customer service, enhancing the customer experience, and driving overall business performance by identifying areas for improvement and implementing strategies to address them.

While key goals vary by organization, common goals for banks and credit unions using mystery shopping include:

  • Improving customer service delivery
  • Closing gaps between performance and expectations
  • Increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty
  • Identifying training needs and skills gaps
  • Benchmarking performance against competitors or industry standards
  • Assessing marketing strategies
  • Strengthening brand promise and consistency
  • Informing strategy and executive decision-making

What Are the Best Practice Metrics to Track?

A number of key metrics can be tracked to evaluate frontline performance and ensure the effectiveness of your mystery shopping program. Commonly used metrics include:

1. Customer Service Interaction

Evaluate how well your employees engage with customers by collecting feedback on specific behaviors, including their greeting, listening skills, product knowledge, and overall communication.

2. Product Knowledge

Measure employee knowledge about products or services offered. This can include their ability to answer detailed questions, provide accurate information, and make appropriate recommendations.

3. Sales Skills

Evaluate the effectiveness of sales techniques used by frontline employees. This can include upselling or cross-selling, suggestive selling, or promotion of specific products or services.

4. Response Time

Measure the time it takes for employees to respond to customer inquiries or requests. This can include phone call, email, or in-person service response times.

5. Overall Customer Experience

Capture the overall impression and satisfaction level of the mystery shopper. This can include factors like friendliness, helpfulness, and the likelihood of recommending the business to others.

6. Competitive Benchmarking

Compare the performance of your financial institution with competitors by conducting mystery shopping visits at all of your locations. This can provide insights into areas where your business may excel or areas that need improvement to catch up to the competition.

7. Follow-up/Issue Resolution

Evaluate how well employees handle customer complaints or issues, including their ability to resolve problems effectively and provide appropriate follow-up.

Recruiting or Selecting Mystery Shoppers

At What Touchpoints Do You Recruit?

Recruiting mystery shoppers from your own customer base can be an effective approach, as these individuals are already familiar with your financial institution and can provide valuable feedback. Here are some steps to recruit mystery shoppers from your customer base:

1. Identify Potential Shoppers

Segment your customer base to identify individuals who meet specific criteria, such as demographic characteristics or purchasing behaviors that align with your target audience.

2. Invite Customers to Become Shoppers

Determine the best channels or touchpoints to reach out to your customers and invite them to participate in the program.

3. Explain the Opportunity

Clearly communicate the purpose and benefits of becoming a mystery shopper. Highlight that their feedback will help improve the customer experience and ensure their voices are heard. Emphasize any incentives, such as stipends, that can encourage participation.

4. Selection Process

Once you have a pool of interested customers, evaluate and select participants based on your criteria.

Recruiting mystery shoppers from your customer base provides an opportunity to engage and strengthen your relationship with your customers by involving them in shaping the future of your organization.

How to Gain Valuable Feedback?

The primary source of feedback is the detailed reports provided by your mystery shoppers. The reports typically include observations, interactions, and any issues encountered during an experience. This information can then be analyzed and utilized to improve operations, enhance employee training, and ultimately enhance customer satisfaction.

Choosing a Mystery Shopping Third-Party

What to Look For in a Mystery Shopping Partner

When selecting a mystery shopping vendor, here are some things you should look for:

1. Experience and Expertise

Look for a vendor with a solid track record and experience in conducting mystery shopping programs. They should have a good understanding of the banking industry and your specific challenges and objectives.

2. Customization and Flexibility

They should be flexible in designing surveys, selecting mystery shoppers, and adapting to your changing requirements.

3. Shopper Recruitment and Training

They should have a rigorous shopper recruitment process, along with training procedures to ensure shoppers are well-prepared for assignments.

4. Quality Assurance

They should have robust systems in place to monitor shopper performance, ensure consistency, and validate data accuracy.

5. Reporting and Analytics

The vendor should provide comprehensive and easy-to-understand reports that highlight key findings and actionable insights. They should have advanced analytics and real-time data delivery capabilities to help you make data-driven decisions and improve your business operations.

6. Technology and Data Security

Ensure the vendor utilizes modern technology platforms to collect, analyze, and report data efficiently. They should have strict protocols in place to protect sensitive information.

7. Customer Support

Determine their responsiveness, availability, and willingness to address your concerns or queries in a timely manner.

8. Long-term Partnership Potential

Consider whether the vendor is capable of growing and evolving with your business.

What Functions Must a Mystery Shopping Program Have?

Here are some common functions a mystery shopping program should have:

  • Assignment management
  • Shopper recruitment and management:
  • Training and guidelines
  • Assignment tracking and reminders
  • Evaluation criteria and scoring
  • Data collection and reporting
  • Quality control and validation
  • Performance analytics
  • Communication and feedback
  • Program scalability and customization

Building Mystery Shopper Reporting in your Portal

What Is Needed in a Mystery Shopping Portal?

When you need access to your mystery shopping data, several key elements are typically required to ensure seamless, rewarding engagement. These elements include:

1. Mystery Shopping Reports

You should have access to detailed mystery shopping reports that provide comprehensive information about each interaction conducted by your mystery shoppers.

2. Performance Metrics

These metrics can help measure and track various aspects of your business, such as customer service, product quality, compliance with brand standards, and overall customer experience.

3. Trend Analysis and Reporting

Identifying patterns, trends, and changes in performance over time can provide valuable information for strategic decision-making and continuous improvement efforts.

4. Recommendations and Action Plans

Recommendations derived from insights can help you make informed decisions and implement changes or improvements in your operations, customer service, or training programs.

5. Customization and Flexibility

Different clients may have unique data requirements and preferences. Customized data access could involve tailoring reports, data formats, and/or visualization options.

What Reporting Is Necessary for Visualizing Feedback?

When visualizing mystery shopping feedback, it is important to have the right reporting to effectively communicate the findings.

Here are some key components that can make your reporting more understandable – and thus more valuable – to you:

  1. Overall Scores
  2. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
  3. Detailed Feedback
  4. Comparative Analysis
  5. Trend Analysis
  6. Heatmaps or Spatial Analysis
  7. Actionable Recommendations

Implementing Mystery Shoppers Feedback & Learnings

Apply Learnings to Your Overall CX

Here are some ways you can apply findings from mystery shopping to enhance your overall CX:

1. Identify Strengths and Weaknesses​

Mystery shopping evaluations can reveal both strengths and weaknesses in your CX. Analyze the feedback to identify areas where your business excels and areas that require improvement.

2. Customer Journey Mapping

Mystery shopping can provide a firsthand perspective of the customer journey. Use this information to create or refine your customer journey map, which outlines the various touchpoints and interactions a customer has with your business. Identify pain points and opportunities for improvement along the journey.

3. Training and Development

Mystery shopping can highlight gaps in employee knowledge, skills, and adherence to customer service standards. Use these insights to develop targeted training programs and resources to address these areas. By improving employee capabilities, you can enhance the overall customer experience. See the section below for tips on both individual and group coaching.

4. Standardize Processes

Mystery shopping can reveal inconsistencies in service delivery across different locations or channels. Use these findings to ensure that customers receive a consistent experience, regardless of where they interact with your business.

5. Set Performance Benchmarks

Use the data collected to set performance benchmarks and goals for your CX. Monitor progress and strive to meet or exceed these benchmarks. Regularly review and update the benchmarks to reflect evolving customer expectations.

6. Employee Recognition and Rewards

Recognize and reward employees who consistently deliver excellent customer experiences as identified through mystery shopping evaluations.

7. Address Specific Issues

Mystery shopping feedback may uncover specific issues or pain points experienced by customers. Address issues promptly and effectively with process improvements, system updates, or changes in customer service protocols.

8. Customer Feedback Integration

Combine mystery shopping findings with other customer feedback sources, such as surveys, reviews, and social media comments, for a more comprehensive understanding of the customer experience.

9. Continuous Improvement

Mystery shopping should be viewed as an ongoing process rather than a one-time event. Regularly conduct mystery shopping evaluations to track progress, measure the impact of improvements, and identify new areas for enhancement. Continuously strive to improve your CX based on the insights gained.

Use Feedback to Improve Your Training and Orientation Procedures

An effective approach to frontline performance management follows a process like the following:

1. Measure Everyday Interactions

You are being tested in your customers’ minds every day, with every experience. Moment by moment. The big question: Does the service they received today live up to their expectations? How large is the gap between what they expect and what they actually experience? Are you accurately capturing what they are thinking and feeling about you at any given moment in time?

Because the customer mindset can change day-to-day, you need to know what it is in real time. If you are relying on lagging indicators like a static CX metric, you are only seeing a snapshot of a condition that has already changed.

And you can’t base sound strategy on this kind of outdated (and therefore inaccurate) intel. You need reliable, in-the-moment leading indicators to get ahead of fluid, on-the-ground conditions. You need a detailed assessment of all the behaviors that go into that service and/or sales experience.

2. Strengthen Execution

Performance management resources should be leveraged to quickly close the gaps between your customers’ expectations and their actual service experiences.

Detailed customer assessments conducted by those who are actually experiencing your service are one of the best sources of insight into the specific behaviors that need to be encouraged to strengthen your brand promise. Acting on this insight to accelerate frontline upskilling precisely as needed can bring about swift and highly visible changes in performance.

3. Continuously Build Skills

Building customer loyalty through precise measurement and targeted skill-building is a continuous process. When your front line has mastered the skills that deliver the expected standard of service in their daily interactions with your customers, the bottom-line result is retained, repeated and referred business.

Coaching and Informing Training

Feedback from mystery shopping should be used to inform and guide employee coaching and performance. Provide feedback at the individual and group levels: Each individual’s performance is a part of the whole organization’s overall performance and success in meeting with its objectives. Regular group coaching sessions will help individual team members see the relevance of their performance to the entire team and the organization.

1. Group Coaching Framework

During a group coaching session, follow this 3-step approach to get the most value from your feedback:

a) Focus on Strengths: E.g., “Let’s talk about what we did well – what do you see as our team’s strengths?”

b) Focus on Improvement: E.g., “Let’s talk about what we need to improve – what are your observations here – where is our team collectively underperforming?”

c) Focus on Commitment: E.g., “What do you think we should primarily focus on in the coming week/month? I have my thoughts on what will get us some immediate successes, but I would like to hear yours.”

2. Individual Coaching Framework

A similar approach can be used in an individual coaching session:

a) Focus on Strengths: E.g., “Tell me what you did well – what do you perceive to be your strengths here?”

b)Focus on Improvement: E.g., “Let’s talk about what you need to improve – what are your thoughts/ideas?”

c)Focus on Commitment: E.g., “What do you want to focus on in the coming week?”

3. Self-Directed Learning

To complement manager-led coaching sessions, a mystery shopping program may offer the option of self-directed learning for employees. In this approach, customer feedback is made directly available to the individual employee, at his or her convenience. This allows employees to take greater ownership of their development, as they are able to focus on the specific skills or behaviors they need to learn to immediately improve their performance.

By incorporating feedback from mystery shopping into your employee coaching and performance management efforts, you can ensure that your employees are better equipped to provide exceptional customer experiences – every customer, every time!

Mystery shopping can be a powerful tool for developing and mastering tactical approaches for achieving your strategic objectives – especially if the objective is strengthening frontline execution.

If you’re ready to learn more about implementing your own mystery shop program, reach out to one of our CX experts today!

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