Customer Experience: How Mystery Shopping Can Help You Increase Profits

Mystery shopping is the secret weapon used by the world’s most successful and profitable companies. But it really doesn’t matter what size you are. What matters is how well you treat your customers. Research indicates that 4% of unhappy customers complain; 96% simply go away, never to be seen or heard from again. When you consider the life-time value of a customer in your business, suddenly customer satisfaction and retention take on a whole new meaning.

Depending on the industry you’re in, it can cost you, on average, nine times more to attract new customers into your business than to retain the customers you have. Much of these costs are due to the expenses of advertising and maintaining a sales force. Advertising costs continue to rise despite the medium you use. If you are lucky enough to have a sales force, attracting top sales talent usually comes with a hefty price tag when you consider salaries and benefits. So the more customers you keep, the less you have to advertise and market, resulting in more profits. It’s a fairly easy equation.

But how do you manage to hang on to your customers? Easy. Find out what they value today and then deliver it. Keep in mind that consumers are a fairly fickle group. What they value today may not be what they value tomorrow. The best way to keep track of what they value is to engage in mystery shopping. The on-going process of evaluating your operations, policies and procedures, staff behavior, products and services, and physical environment if you have one is critical to retention and profitability. Mystery shopping is an intelligent way to discover the weak links in your operations then fix these to match your customer’s expectations. Consider the following points.

• Mystery shopping lets you stay in touch with customer trends. The process will tell you how well you are meeting, and in some cases exceeding, customer expectations and it will point you toward the things you need to consider to meet future customer demands.
• Mystery shopping sets the stage for better communications with your customers. You can’t fix something if you don’t know it’s broken and this process will clearly identify those areas of your operations that need work.
• Mystery shopping lets you track customer satisfaction levels. Over time you can monitor how well you are adjusting your operations to meet customer demands.

For more information on how to implement a mystery shopping program in your organization, contact me at www.marketviewpoint.com. I look forward to helping you create the ultimate customer experience through mystery shopping in your organization.