(This is a guest post by Anna Bird of the Marketing Leadership Council, our sister program for marketing leaders and their teams.)

Best Buy’s Twitter-based customer service tool has created a lot of buzz over the last year. We asked John Bernier, Best Buy’s Social Media Steward, what makes it work behind the scenes. John is the Digital Product Line Manager and Social Media Steward at Best Buy. He develops digital products and tools for Best Buy employees and customers, while shepherding social media initiatives, such as Twelpforce.  He has worked at Best Buy since 2004, playing a variety of roles in marketing communications and marketing strategy. We spoke to him early last month. Read More »

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? Read More »