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ClentWelcome to Part 3 in our Mystery Shopper Research Series, where we cover common research objectives for Mystery Shopper along examples from our own work with Clients.
In Parts 1 & 2 of this series I covered –
- Mystery Shopper Research as another window into your Customer Experience
- Common misconceptions about Mystery Shopper Research
- The simple answer as to why Mystery Shopper Research programs are often so poorly run
- Why Mystery Shopper is best understood as a qualitative form of research
- Our definition of Mystery Shopper Research
- The value that Mystery Shopper Research provides
- Where Mystery Shopper results fit into classic CX data architecture
- Why it’s important not to confuse Mystery Shopper Research with Customer Satisfaction surveys – and how they work together
Here are the links to both Parts 1 and 2 –
https://www.omnitouchinternational.com/mystery-shopper-research-definition-and-value-part-2/
In this Part 3 post we will –
- Add the term ‘current state’ to our Descriptive data
- Introduce our 7-Step Design Process for a Mystery Shopper Program
- Work through Step 1 – ‘What I want to learn’ research objectives and examples
- Compare and contrast Mystery Shopper Research with Customer Journey Mapping
When we run a Mystery Shopper program we’re gathering ‘current state’ descriptive findings
We’ve established that findings from Mystery Shopper Research fit into the CX metrics category of Descriptive data.
Where Descriptive data describes what actually happened to a Customer. Not their perception and not what they do as a result of their perception.
Let’s now add the label current state to describe the findings that we gather.
Because your Mystery Shopper program tells you the way things happen right now – the current state of what your Customers go through.
Some of our Clients have called this current state evaluation their reality check.
Whether that’s conducting 100 Mystery Shopper enquiry calls to ask about buying insurance coverage or carrying out 10 overnight holiday stays in a quaint bed and breakfast to understand how special the experience feels.
Organizations want to learn what it’s like – right now, current state – to interact with thir Contact Center on a sales call or experience a week-end getaway in their bed and breakfast property.
They want a structured, Customer-oriented perspective that helps them see what real Customers go through now across selected journeys and touchpoints.
To gain findings that can help them both correlate with other research methods and make better decisions about what actions to take.
Our 7-Step Design Process for a Mystery Shopper Program
To help our Clients get more from their Mystery Shopper Research, we developed a half-day workshop on the topic.
At the core of that workshop is our 7-Step Design Process for a Mystery Shopper Program.
The process we use ourselves when designing a Mystery Shopper program for a Client.
Here is a summary of the 7 Steps – each of which we will cover in detail as we progress through this series.
- What do I want to learn: Define and document what you aim to learn from your research program – your Research Objectives
- What Scenarios do I want to test: Define specific journey and/or touchpoint scenarios to be tested / Categorize each scenario as either existing Customer, prospective Customer or Observation
- Special Profiling & Selection Needs: Consider special profiling needs for the Mystery Shoppers as to what they need to ‘be’ or ‘have’
- Select Performance Standards: Select and define the Performance Standards to be scored and exactly how they are to be scored
- Plan Volumes & Timing: Develop a fieldwork calendar that lays out the finalized volumes and timing of Mystery Shopper interactions
- Design Reporting: Layout report design and flow – decide how will results be presented to stakeholders both when finalized and as they come in (red flags)
- Design & Execute Training: Design the paths and scripts for Mystery Shoppers to execute as well as the tasks and equiprment along the way
We will cover each step in detail as we progress through this series.
The first step in your Mystery Shopper Program is to decide what you want to learn
Let’s take a closer look at the first and arguably most important step: deciding what you want to learn.
This step sets the foundation for the entire program and determines the approach we’ll take throughout the rest of the process.
In fact that’s the first step for any form of research.
Because you don’t just send someone out to visit your branch, send an enquiry email to your Salespeople or make a reservation online and wait to ‘see what happens’.
That’s about as poorly designed as it gets.
Now and then we hear people people say, “Yes, we did Mystery Shopper Research. It didn’t work out very well.”
But you can’t expect any level of utility or organizational buy-in of results if you take an amateurish approach to Mystery Shopper. Or any form of Customer research.
Here are common Research Objectives for Mystery Shopper Research
Let’s get into common Research Objectives for Mystery Shopper research.
1. Current State Research
Earlier in this post we introduced the term ‘current state’. What’s actually happening right now. Not what we think or hope is happening.
A Client might say –
-“We are planning to design a new training program for our Concierge Team worldwide. To help us understand the current level of performance and identify opportunities for advanced training we’d like to run a Mystery Shopper program.”
-“We don’t have easy visibility into how quickly and well our 75 outlets respond to Customer enquiries. So we’d like a current state evaluation across all 75 outlets to identify what’s really going on.”
-“We report annually to our global board. They require that we present the current state of our service delivery. We’d like a Mystery Shopper program to objectively measure our current state of service delivery so that we can include results in our annual report and presentation.”
-“We have a Customer journey that crosses multiple departments (as many do). While we have individual departmental data that tells us what happened within a single function, we don’t have a birds-eye view from the the Customer perspective and how those individual pieces of data tie together.”
2. Industry or Competitor Research
Mystery Shopper allows for comparative analysis and learnings across a pre-selected pool of competitors or other types of companies – even those outside your industry.
A Client might say –
-“We want to learn how we compare and contrast with our competitors. We want you to do 40 visits to our retail shop, and then 40 visits each to the retail shops of five key competitors. The research should show us not only what our strengths and weaknesses are vis a vis our competitors, we should gain insights into what others do so that we can learn from them.”
-“Our industry association is running an annual Customer experience awards program. As part of the overall scoring for the program all Entrants submit to undergoing a Mystery Shopper program to benchmark the current level of experience they deliver.”
-“We want to learn the current state of service out there delivered by leading Service brands. What do they do and what can we learn from that. So please make 50 calls to our Contact Center and 50 similar calls to each to these three leading Service brands – even though they are not in our industry.”
We had a Client in Malaysia that didn’t want to be the best telecomms provider in Malaysia. They wanted to be the best service brand in Malaysia regardless of industry.
So they rolled out a Mystery Shopper program where we tested respected banks, airlines, courier companies and leading telecomms providers in other countries to build a comparative analysis and gather learnings.
3. Change Impact Research
Mystery Shopper allows you to do a ‘before’ and ‘after’ assessment. To assess the impact of some kind of change.
Sometimes that change is deliberate and internally motivated – such as the implementation of a new software, introduction of new digital tools or the roll-out of a new training program.
Other times that change comes from outside external events – such as a new competitor entering the market or a change in the regulatory landscape.
A Client might say –
-“We rolled out a new software system for our Customer Service people to use six months ago. Now we want to see if the system is delivering the impacts that we expected.”
-“We opened in a new country and we’d like to benchmark the performance of our new country operation against the performance of our parent company operation in here in X country.”
-“We recently outsourced our Customer Care operation to a third party. To understand the level of quality our new outsourcer delivers we’d like to undertake a Mystery Shopper program.”
-“We worked throught a three year Customer centric transformation. We want to see if the efforts around organization-wide transformation are actually benefitting the Customer experience.
One of our hospitality Clients used Mystery Shopper to prove out how well their brand values were being brought to life for Customers – across both backline and frontline departments.
4. Level of Compliance Research
We’ve worked with many financial institutions and public sector agencies that have externally regulated levels of compliance performance.
Levels of compliance which – if not met – can result in having their business fined and even shut down.
A Client might say –
“Dan, as you know the Monetary Authority has strict compliance standards with regard to how we communicate with vulnerable Customers. We want a Mystery Shopper program to see how well we are doing in this particular area – before the regulatory authority gets involved or runs their own program on us.”
5. Exploration of learnings from other Customer research methods
Mystery Shopper provides a window into what actually happens to a Customer across a select journey or set of touchpoints. That descriptive data we’ve been talking about.
So it’s common to hear Clients say things like this –
-“Dan, we ran our relationship/transaction survey with our business Customers and received some comments that gave us concern…” or “Dan, we were analyzing Customer sentiment across social media channels and a common critique kept coming up so we’d like to explore that more deeply…”
-We had an airline Client tell us, “Dan, we’ve received numerous complaints about the application of our overweight luggage fees across different airports here in our country. We’d like you to do a Mystery Shopper program – specifically on the overweight luggage scenario – to help us understand exactly how Customers experience the overweight luggage situation in different hubs.”
-“Our internal Quality Assurance Team rates our live chat interactions for technical support as going very well. And yet our Customer Satisfaction scores from Customers on those same chats are not as good as we expected. We’d like a Mystery Shopper on technical support live chat interactions to understand what’s really going on.”
Data and findings picked up from other forms of Customer research – whether quantitative or qualitative – may lend themselves to deeper exploration.
Because if the need is to gain context and insight into what is really happening to Customers, a Mystery Shopper program can help.
Mystery Shopper Research and Customer Journey Mapping – two windows into Customer experience
Researchers understand the value of ‘triangulation’
Triangulation is a research term that refers to using multiple methods, sources, or perspectives to study a single phenomenon.
It involves looking at something from different angles to get a fuller, more accurate understanding.
When you’re looking at the various Customer research methods to understand the Customer experience remember that it’s not typically an ‘either or‘ discussion.
It’s not saying we do either Customer Journey Mapping or we do Mystery Shopper Research.
It’s more often an ‘and‘ discussion. As in –
“We do Customer Journey Mapping where that research approach is relevant and we do Mystery Shopper Research where that research approach is relevant. And for some journeys and or set of touchpoints we may end up doing both.”
Both Mystery Shopper Research and Customer Journey Mapping involve well understood processes and practices.
You don’t make this stuff as you go along and hope for helpful outcomes. That takes us back to Amateur Hour which is never good.
- Customer Journey Mapping involves workshops, interviews and data collection to create a visual map of a Customer journey. And it always involves having real Customers in the room to help us lear what real Customer think, feel and do as they progress along their journey.
- Mystery Shopper Research involves a fully pre-planned program design and fieldwork execution where trained Mystery Shoppers interact with a brand and follow a specific scenario and set of actions to assess what we want to learn. The data is based on individual and aggregated observations and is both quantitative and qualitative in nature.
Mystery Shopper is a full pre-planned research method
Mystery Shopper is fully pre-planned research method.
You decide in advance what you want to learn and you direct the Mystery Shoppers to do or say what you want them to do or say as they interact with a brand.
Mystery Shoppers don’t make it up as they go along. That would defeat the purpose of actively trying to learn something specific.
Remember that Mystery Shoppers are not real Customers.
In the Research Team, we carefully design the ‘scenario’ that we want our Mystery Shopper to test.
Here’s a Client example for a bank
A banking Client asked us to test how well the Counter Staff at our bank listened for ‘wealth cues’ from Customers that they served at the counter.
They had rolled out an intensive sales training program for its officers some months before and they wanted to evaluate how well the training content was being utilized in real life.
So we directed our Mystery Shopper to enter the bank branch and drop into the conversation with the counter staff serving them that they have received a financial windfall due to the sale of a property.
We then observed if and how well that Counter Staff introduced the Mystery Shopper to a Wealth Manager to talk about how to best invest that windfall.
Defined learning points for this scenario included –
- How did that introduction go between the counter staff and wealth manager go?
- Were company standards followed?
- How could the hand-off be improved?
- Do we need to improve our internal training programs or coaching sessions?
- Should we rethink the process we currently use?
And as you’d imagine, the scenario carried over into the conversation with the Wealth Manager to assess how well that conversation went.
With Mystery Shopper Research we can, in principle, test almost anything we want, as many times as we want over the time period of our choosing.
In our next post in this series
Thank you so much for reading!
In this post we –
- Added the term ‘current state’ for our Descriptive data
- Introduced our 7-Step Design Process for a Mystery Shopper Program
- Worked ‘What I want to learn’ Research Objectives and examples
- Compared and contrasted Mystery Shopper Research with Customer Journey Mapping
In our next post in our Mystery Shopper Research series we will –
- Look at Scenarios – what they are, how they work and how to classify them
- Recommend that you make the process cross-functional and why
- Explain what we mean by ‘The Magic 20%’ – the powerful and unexpected qualitative learnings that you should expect from your Mystery Shopper program
Daniel Ord
[email protected] / www.omnitouchinternational.com
