We recently received an interesting inquiry from a member curious to know if other companies use actual customers as mystery shoppers to provide feedback on service interactions. Based on responses from the membership, companies tend to see the value of mystery shoppers to assess rep performance– but there is a lack of consensus on who should do the mystery shopping. Some noted that using customers is an innovative twist on the standard practice of having internal or third parties conduct this type of assessment.
CCC members: Catch the entire peer discussion on mystery shopping in the Customer Experience Forum.
But if the goal of mystery shopping is to measure the quality of the interaction – don’t all customers have the potential to provide the same insight as mystery shoppers? So what additional value does an official mystery shopper program bring?
Instead of a mystery shopping program, you could surface feedback that reflects the actual customer perspective by simply calling customers and interviewing them about their experiences. Companies that do this well report very actionable information related to both the frontline staff and overall organization.
CCC has seen two compelling practices here.
1. National Australia Group follows up on post-call customer surveys with low scores to learn about the customer experience and surface improvement opportunities. What’s really interesting about NAG’s approach is that the outbound calls serve as an opportunity to truly analyze the root causes of poor customer experiences, specifically targeting areas of improvement (e.g., rep skills, process and policy). These calls are much more than simple surveys – they actually identify coaching opportunities and processes fixes.
With this strategy, NAG actually recovers 62% of dissatisfied customers, while improving first contact resolution scores by 31% and CSAT scores by 11%.
2. Telecommunications firm OmniTel does something similar, going so far as to supplant its internal quality monitoring efforts with a customer-derived QA process—literally using customer interviews to learn about the customer experience and then using the information derived to coach and develop frontline staff.
As a result of its efforts, OmniTel sees a 15% increase in customer satisfaction scores and a 60% decrease in calls rated “poor.” You can read more about OmniTel’s approach in this previous post.
So, is mystery shopping as we know it unnecessary? Could you save costs by using your own employees to gather similar data via outbound customer surveys…or does anyone think that mystery shoppers offer something else that the QA plus outbound survey approach doesn’t address?
CCC members: See the full story of National Australia Group’s approach to identifying improvement areas and recovering customers with their proactive service approach.
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