Mystery shops: intrusive or a useful weather gauge? The answer lies in clearly defining what you want to achieve while you are in the planning stage.
Whether you want to carry out competition analysis or understand what your customers are experiencing, you should firstly be committed to act on the findings. Therefore plan accordingly – include a budget for counter measures, be tactical and cut your cloth appropriately. Secondly, your research should be carried out independently.
Mystery shopping ‘pricing’ is fairly straightforward to action and requires a strategic policy decision by senior management in terms of reaction. Resolving customer experience issues requires time, training, and commitment. If you only start to plan this once you have finished the mystery shop programme, then by the time you have created the plan for counter measures, received management sign off and been given funding, the initial findings will probably be invalid.
The original personnel, who required support, might have moved on and more pressing problems might have now surfaced. So include counter measures as part of your mystery shopping programme from the beginning and plan to implement them swiftly.
Here’s another conundrum: what drives behaviour? Is customer experience being driven by core attitudes? Consider mystery shopping your business as a supplier and understand how your management promotes itself and your brand. Why? Because your frontline staff might be translating what they witness as ‘best practice’, as displayed by senior management, to your customers.
Outside of the showroom, a lot of investment is made in call centres and in the online presence of your business. We all know the statistic that customers go to dealers on average 1.2 times before making a purchase, so the need to be on top of your game when they do is a given.
Consider how many times your customers interact with you outside of your showroom. Call centres, live chat, vehicle configurators, dealer locators, service booking, even newspaper marketing – these should all be considered in your strategy as they are a window into your business and provide the customer with clues as to what service they might expect when they make a purchasing decision.
It’s important to mention that some businesses are getting it right. I can think of one dealer group in particular that has an excellent live chat service, which clearly projects its company ethos.
So employ some tactical forethought, and mystery shops will have the capacity to save money and improve performance.
Author Martin Dowding is business development manager at MSX International, a commercial partner in Auto Retail Bulletin.
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