How well do your front-line teams interact with your customers?

Your staff on the front line are the first point of contact for any customer enquiring into your business, essentially, they are your brand. If a member of staff doesn’t handle a customer in a professional way, that customer will have a lasting impression of your business based on their interaction with that particular staff member.

You may require all staff to attend customer service training when they join the business, but how do you measure how well your front-line team interact with you customers on an ongoing basis?

Mystery Shopping can measure any touch point into your business and replicate any scenario and method of how a potential customer might contact you. If you have offices or premises where you speak to customers face-2-face, video mystery shopping could be an ideal method to measure this interaction.

Video mystery shoppers wear covert cameras to capture the interaction between the mystery shopper (the customer) and the staff member. You can then see firsthand how a team member interacts with that customer and what first impression they are giving of your business.

If customers are able to phone into your business and talk to your staff, telephone mystery shopping can give you unbiased insight into how these calls are being handled. Each call is recorded to allow you to listen and review the interaction with the relevant team member. As well as measuring how well your sales process is being followed, you will also be able to identify your team’s customer service skills, looking at areas such as their tone and level of friendliness and professionalism.

Measuring inbound website enquiries is probably the most important mystery shopping method. Utilising online mystery shopping, you can very quickly identify the speed, method and quality of the response to a customer’s enquiry, that’s if the enquiry is responded to at all. At My View Research we carried out a recent study to look at how two different industries handled their online customer enquiries. You will be surprised at how many didn’t bother to respond to the customer at all. Find out more about our research here.

Mystery shopping is best used as an ongoing training and development tool

Regardless of which method of mystery shopping you choose, it needs to be imbedded into your business as an ongoing feedback process, to support with the training and development of your team. When choosing a mystery shopping agency, look at how they provide the insight and data back to you. Do they have an online reporting platform with unlimited user access, or an app that provides you with on the move real time data? Being able to access your mystery shopping results quickly, efficiently and on the move, is crucial in getting buy in from your team to use the information and promote change and development throughout your business.

To find out more about our mystery shopping solutions please click below: