improving & innovating the customer experience

The mystery of mystery shopping

21st September 2010 - Businesses should listen to frontline staff, rather than conducting traditional mystery shopping exercises to check up on them, according to a new guide to mystery shopping from business improvement consultancy,  Insight Exchange (IE). The paper, The mystery of mystery shopping,  argues that listening to, and improving the experience of frontline staff rather than doing spot checks through mystery shopping is the best way to create a motivated workforce, improved customer experience and increased profits.

The guide examines how organisations traditionally develop an 'inside, out' culture - where ideas and initiatives are pushed out to the employees from a small leadership group at the centre of the business.  The frontline staff, who are directly responsible for creating a positive customer experience and so have the most potential to influence the success of the business, are often not involved in the creation of the strategy and plans.

Insight Exchange argues that it is only by turning this structure on its head and creating an 'outside in' culture - accepting that frontline staff are intrinsic to the generation of ideas and initiatives that improve the business - that companies can improve customer experience and therefore profits.

Insight Exchange also argues that listening properly to those employees who deal with staff can reduce churn, improve the customer experience, engender loyalty from both employees and customers, and - most importantly - create practical and innovative improvement programmes to the business.

The guide also details the questions a business should ask itself before embarking on a mystery shopping exercise:

1. How do you position your mystery shopping programme with frontline staff? Is it a carrot or stick?

2. Do you involve frontline staff in the design and implementation of your programme?

3. How do you formally enable staff to contribute ideas about practical business improvement (not just a suggestions box)?

4. How do ideas from the frontline get fed back to head office?

5. Do link your mystery shopping programme to coaching and development for frontline staff?

Matt Lynch, partner at Insight Exchange and author of the guide, says: "Mystery shopper exercises are usually run as spying missions, designed to catch out members of staff. They become a stick to beat employees with, rather than a way to improve customer experience. It's not enough to know what's working and what's not, you need to know why, so you can change it. The best way to improve the customer experience is to understand what's happening at the point of interaction between the customer and frontline staff.

The insight paper is part one of a two-part guide to effective mystery shopping. Part two will focus on how to conduct an effective 'no-mystery' shopping programme, and will be available later in 2010.

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