Terror in the Boardroom – how senior Leaders impact Mystery Shopper research

Senior Leaders impact Mystery Shopper results in a big way – often through how they react to the findings of their Mystery Shopper program.

I share a true story of how senior Leaders at one Client reacted to the findings from their Mystery Shopper program.

And how their reaction basically killed the value of the program.

A true story: Terror in the Boardroom

I share the story below in narrative form –

“Dear Reader – here’s what happened.

Once the program was finished we conducted our analysis. Most of the Mystery Shopper results were ‘ok’. Nothing spectacular.

But one of their Customer touchpoints performed poorly on their turnaround time commitment.

Rather than receiving a reply within 2 – 3 days – as promised – the actual reply time-frames ranged from one week to no reply received.

We knew what we were getting into when we took on their program. The Organization’s service quality reputation was mixed at best.

But the fact they were using Mystery Shopper Research as a tool for insight and improvement was an overall good sign.

But even we were taken aback when – after submitting the final results – the Client asked us to edit out the poor results.

And not just once – we had to redo the complete deck and set of reports three times before they were satisfied.

Senior Leaders impact Research findings

A month later, a Service Quality Manager at the Client’s office met up with us to tell us what happened

The internal Research Team was tasked to present the findings of the Mystery Shopper program to the senior Leaders.

We had not been invited to do the presentation. Which is admittedly unusual.

When senior Leaders saw the poor results for turnaround time for that one department, they yelled at everyone at the conference table.

And launched into assigning blame.

Of course, the people working at that Organization – and sitting around that conference table – were stunned into silence.

And the unspoken message came across loud and clear.

It’s safer to hide bad results than to anger senior Leaders.

That’s a great example of a ‘cultural belief’.

A cultural belief is an assumption that people in an Organization follow because it either helps them ‘succeed’ in that Organization. Or at the least it helps them prevent ‘failing’ in that Organization.

Cultural beliefs flow from senior leadership.

If they believe work from home is not productive, then few people in the Organization will put work from home forward as a solution.

If they believe that only a person with a degree can do a certain job, then people in the Organization will only look for (or work with) people with degrees.

See how that works?

In this Organization, the senior Leaders have created a cultural belief that it is safter to hide bad news than share it.

Which over time and across Employees will become engrained in how that Organization operates.

And kill any and all opportunities to gain insight and improve.

Avoid Terror in the Boardroom

It’s sad to see a viable Mystery Shopper program go down in flames. Simply due to the fear created by senior Leaders.

Here’s what I’d suggest you do to mitigate this type of event.

If you are after Customer Research of some form, ask your senior Leaders to sign a simple agreement when that Customer Research program gets approved.

Perhaps something like this:

The purpose of our Mystery Shopper program is to ________. It’s likely we will uncover things that we want to hear – and things that we don’t.

We will resist the natural urge to cleanse results to make them look better.

We can only get better if we truly know how we’re doing – and for CX-based Mystery Shopper programs, how our Customers are experiencing us.

With this in mind, we will take the good with the bad, the great with the not so great, look at results in perspective – and use them to help us move forward.

Let your Research Partner present findings

If you engaged an external Research Partner to conduct the research, let them present the findings.

Typically such a presentation will include the research methodology, the findings themselves and what they mean, and examples from other Organizations.

Your Research Partner operates outside the politics of the organization.

That brings an important level of objectivity and credibility to the process.

When the Research Partner doesn’t present, someone within the organization takes on the responsibility of sharing the findings.

However, we’ve noticed that when in-house teams present research findings, they often omit a lot of context, examples, and recommendations. Additionally, the politics can become more highly charged.

We hope these few words on Mystery Shopper research are helpful to you.

https://www.omnitouchinternational.com/introducing-our-mystery-shopper-research-series/