You are extremely busy. You're often so immersed in the daily operations of your company that it's hard to take a step back and objectively see your business through your customer's eyes.  So how much could you learn by having someone outside of your company paint a picture of a customer's typical experience with your business? Could you validate what you do great? Yes. Could you vividly see what needs to be improved and how? Yes.

The Consultative Mystery Shop is an evaluation conducted by CSS consultants and additional mystery shoppers where CSS uses a combination of subjective tools and objective evaluation forms to assess many aspects of the customer's experience relating to staff attitudes, service delivery processes, and the facility layout and signage.

Each Shop Report details findings, conclusions, and recommendations to address issues for a particular employee group, location, function, or service delivery method.  CSS uses shoppers to experience and interact with client processes, services, and staff to paint a picture of the experience through the customer's eyes.  Among the types of shops that CSS provides are:

• Web shops which involve CSS being given common questions/scenarios and accessing the client's website to find the answers.  Shops review the site for ease of navigation, system speed, usefulness and completeness of information provided, etc.

• Telephone shops to test system ease of navigation, employee knowledge-base, and customer service skills.

• Onsite shops to enable an evaluation of navigation to the facility and to some extent within the stores/locations.   Shoppers make inquiries that would test internal processes for information gathering/sharing and associated wait times, and the shops enable an evaluation of employee knowledge and customer service skills.

• E-mail shops to evaluate whether or not responses are sent, the timeliness of the responses, the personalized nature of the responses, the quality of responses, and the customized nature of the responses.

The client gains a snapshot of the consistency level and effectiveness of service provided across multiple locations and among various staff.  More specifically, you could receive the following benefits from implementing recommendations resulting from the shops:

• Increased in-store and web sales.

• Increased customer retention and satisfaction.

• Identified current service levels.

• Snapshot obtained of the consistency and effectiveness of service provided among various staff, functions, and stores.

• Determined opportunities for improving the ease and effectiveness of communications with and service to customers.

• Ongoing monitoring of performance at the employee, facility, and organizational levels.

To receive a White Paper on Mystery Shopping, please CLICK HERE.

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