1. MYSTERY SHOPPING
Understanding the process & designing a customized programme for your company with Service ANGELS.

2. What is Mystery Shopping?
A research tool used by companies to make sure that employees are performing at levels required to make sure that good customer service and company policies are being followed.
It is the process of assessing customer service anonymously and professionally from the point of view of the average educated consumer.
Trained ‘shoppers’ anonymously evaluate customer service delivery, employee sales skills, employee integrity, product quality etc. in order to provide you with an objective view of how your employees treat your customers and how closely they are following the training you have provided.

3. Growth of Mystery Shopping
Mystery shopping is fast becoming a popular and effective way to monitor customer service for many business across a wide range of industries - Banks, Hotels, Automotive Dealerships, Restaurants, Retail Shops, Food Chains, Cinemas, Clubs, Telecoms, IT companies, Government departments, local authorities and many more!
It is a way to make sure that your customer service employees are treating customers the way they are supposed to be treating the customers.
Psychologically, if your employees know that you have a mystery shopping system in place, they are bound to treat all customers well all the times - they don’t know who will be the shopper!

4. Goals of A Mystery Shopping Programme
A mystery shopping programme can be designed to achieve the following goals.
To improve customer service to levels exceeding customer expectations
To ensure compliance with policies, standards and procedures
To enhance staff performance and behaviour
To enforce employee integrity
To keep track and benchmark against competition or previous performance

5. Mystery Shopping vs Customer Feedback
Is mystery shopping the same as customer satisfaction surveys? Can the two substitute one other in terms of assessing an organization’s performance in its delivery of customer service?
They are not the same and cannot not substitute one other. Rather they are complementary- two different sides of the same coin. They are distinctly different measures providing different insights into an organization’s service delivery.
Mystery shopping programmes gather data in the form of directed observation. Mystery shopping focuses on understanding what customer delight-driving behaviours look and sound like. What is it that employees are doing which drives customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction

6. On the other hand, customer feedback programmes gather data in the form of recalled impression. Customer satisfaction surveys typically asks customer to rate their experience with a company e.g service, products prices and their feelings towards the brand
Can they be substituted? No. Customer feedback is about impression. Mystery shopping is about observation. Both are important. They are not interchangeable.
The balanced approach - The ideal programme is a combination of both customer feedback data and mystery shopping observations. Intelligent decisions are based upon good customer feedback, which is turned into action (employee training or service standards deployment), which is then, in turn, measured with a mystery shopping programme to test its successful implementation.

7. The benefits of Mystery Shopping?
Measures levels of standards and pin point customer service weakness areas
Enhances employees sales ability and increase sales figures
Identifies focused customer service training needs
Monitors employee compliance with policy and procedures
Enforces employee integrity
Improves customer retention by keeping customers satisfied all the times
Compliments staff incentive programmes
Helps spot problems early enough
Helps create consistency at national level
Helps keep track and benchmark again competitors and previous performance

8. Why Need Mystery Shopping?
A mystery shopping programme will compel your company to focus on achieving superior customer service standards.
Superior customer service produces satisfied customers.
Satisfied customers buy more and become loyal
Satisfied customers buy additional products and services
Satisfied customers support positive word of mouth
Satisfied customers pay less attention to advertisements of competitors
Satisfied customers deliver more ideas and suggestions
Satisfied customers cost less because these customers have already a relation with your company and some processes might already have been standardized

9. Mystery Shopping can help you answer the following questions:
Are employees handling telephone enquiries appropriately
Are your employees friendly, approachable, and knowledgeable?
What could you do to ensure fewer customers leave with a neutral or negative brand image?
Are customers of every age, ethnicity, and gender receiving the same exceptional level of customer service?
How engaged are your employees, and how can you optimally improve their engagement?
Which locations within your organization are consistent shining examples of offering customer delight, and what are their best practices?
What company changes will result in the highest return on investment (e.g., is it more important to spend resources on shortening customer wait time or on further customer service training)?

10. The basic mystery shopping process
Designing A Mystery Shopping Programme for Your Company
The basic mystery shopping process
1. Setting Objectives and Goals:
Service Angels in co-operation with Client
2. Execution of MS Programme:
Service Angels recruits shoppers, runs programme, collects and/or analyzes data
3. Review Findings & Programmed Re-design:
Service Angels in co-operation with Client

11. Detailed mystery shopping process
1. Setting Objectives & Goals
2. Programme & Survey Design
3. Recruiting Shoppers
4. Data Collection
5. Data Preparation
6. Reporting
7. Review Findings; Repeat Steps 3-7

12. The first 2 steps in the process lay the foundation of the programme
THE FIRST STEP - Identify your company’s important customer service characteristics and objectives - often flowing from your strategy and overall goals and objectives. In a large organisation, it is important to make sure that everyone is on board - from top management to the shop floor level employee. Share your plan with as many departments as you can and promote the benefits of mystery shops
If people have a chance to hear the plan and provide their input before the programme is finalized, they will be much more likely to support the programme, feel some sense of ownership, and be ready to take action based on the results.
Having everyone’s input will help you come up with a good set of service characteristics and standards.
THE SECOND STEP is the development of the questionnaire using the variables or characteristics developed in step 1. Areas of assessment include: customer service, suggestive selling techniques, headcount, store appearance and organization, merchandise displays and stock, cleanliness of the location, signage and advertising compliance, time in line and time elapsed for service, product quality, order accuracy, customer's preferences, cash handling, and return policies.

13. Making the most of a MS programme
For your MS programme to be successful, it is imperative that:
Your staff know that such a programme is in place and know what is expected of them although you don’t tell them when the exercise is going to be done
The measurables are relevant, achievable and oriented towards your objectives
Reporting is open
No victimization as a result of findings
Incentives are provided for excellent performance
Managers devise some critical customer service scenarios

14. Importance of Regular Assessments
You need to contract for regular mystery shopper evaluations, on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis
The evaluation questionnaires should be revised and refocused from time to time, to reflect changes in a company’s customer service goals or simply to put more emphasis on some service aspect.
Regular reports will give a company a much more realistic and accurate picture of how the average service employee performs on a day-to-day basis than will customer surveys do.

15. Working With Service ANGELS
Service ANGELS mystery shopping programmes enable our automotive clients to:
Understand exactly what customer delight-driving behaviours look and sound like
Align company-wide focus on improving the customers’ experiences, resulting in higher return rates
Track and trend behaviours that correlate with guest delight to generate actionable data proven to increase customer satisfaction
Customize programmes to evaluate a variety of different customer touch points, staffed positions, and scenarios
Gain valuable, detailed insight into the customer experience through extensive story-like narrative from our highly trained shoppers
Discover if customers are receiving consistently superior customer service at every location and/or customer touch point
Identify gaps in training needs
Ensure compliance with brand standards and policies

16. The Service ANGELS Process
How do we go about designing a customized Mystery Shopping programme for your business?
First, we spend time with you, our clients, understanding the nature of your business, your service practices and standards.
Then, together, we map out the objectives of the MS programme, design the questionnaire and agree on the expected term of the programme.
Service Angels then recruits, trains mystery shoppers and issues assignments to them in accordance with the programme requirements.
Service Angels collects the results, analyses the data and reports the key findings to the client on an agreed basis- weekly, monthly, quarterly basis etc.
At the completion of the programme, Service Angels (together with the client) assesses the success of the programme and decides either to continue, re-design or end the programme.

17. Our Evaluation Tools www.mysteryshopper.co.zw
Our evaluation questionnaires basically have two basic parts.
First Part
Consists of a series of Yes/No or rating scale questions that takes the evaluator through all of the steps of the contact.
A point value is attached to each of the questions and response, so that points are totalled and tracked or compared from one mystery shopper visit to the next.
Questions related to a phone contact, for instance, might include: Was the telephone answered promptly and professionally? Was the telephone answered in a friendly and enthusiastic manner? Were all of your questions answered accurately?

18. www.mysteryshopper.co.zw Second Part
It is basically a narrative section that provides a step-by-step narration stating what happened to that evaluator either from the time they entered a location to the time they left it or from the time they dialled the phone number to the time they ended the conversation and hung up.
For the phone, an evaluation may look at:
The number of rings before the phone is answered
The quality of the initial greeting
Whether the employee sounded cheerful or enthusiastic
Whether they were knowledgeable.
Did the employee express a genuine interest in the evaluator’s questions and needs?
If the evaluator was put on hold, why were they put on hold and for how long?
If the evaluator was transferred, was the person to whom they were transferred able to answer their question or resolve their issue?
If a follow-up call was promised, how prompt was the follow-up?

19. Our Assessment Reports Are Only First Part of the Process
Mystery shopper evaluations are only one part of the process that makes a mystery shopper programme successful.
How companies use the evaluation reports is the other part.
When you receive the weekly or monthly reports, you need to sit down with the employees identified in the reports or with all staff members to go over the results, and to go over the step-by-step details to look for improvement opportunities - areas where extra training or improved communications might result in higher sales or greater customer retention or loyalty.

20. Tying Rewards To Results
We recommend that companies tie reward and recognition into their mystery shopper programmes.
It can be a pat on the back and a round of applause at a staff meeting or a small monetary reward, that recognition makes the employee feel good and the behaviour that you are rewarding sets an example for the rest of the staff.

21. Focus On Positive Behaviours
You will achieve greater results if you focus more on the positive behaviours uncovered by mystery shopping programmes rather than the negatives.
You are going to uncover what is going wrong- however, if somebody is not going to learn — you have given them chances and if their reports keep coming in bad, and they are driving customers away — then, yes, you have to handle that situation
Negativity breeds negativity, and focusing exclusively on catching people doing things wrong is only going to breed poor morale and resistance to the programme.
By focusing on the positive, and adding a reward element, however, you create an opportunity to improve your customer service to the point where no customer has a bad experience ever.

22. Our Mystery Shopping services are not a Once-Off Programme
It is important that once you start to use mystery shopping as a customer service improvement tool, it is necessary to keep the programme going for the long term.
You can scale it back, from weekly to monthly or monthly to quarterly, once you have established it and you have gotten your service quality up to a good level.
But once you stop doing evaluations and you let that recognition and positive reinforcement kind of slip, there is a good chance that your customer service is going to go back in the direction that it was in before you started. .

23. Why Use Service ANGELS? Why Work With Us
We customize surveys and reports to meet a client’s specific objectives and needs.
We select shoppers according to your customer profile
Project specific training for shoppers
We rotate our shoppers
Data integrity from a geographically wide pool of shoppers
We offer ed pdf’s of surveys/reports
We structure each new project with you

24. How Do l get Started? To Request a Proposal, please contact us NOW!
Paget Kurwakumire
Managing Consultant
(+263) (0)
Loveson Chikwature
Business Development Consultant
(+263) (0)