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How to improve ROI of your Mystery Shopping Program?
ROI (Return on Investment) is a numerical representation of a company’s customer experience management. It is an essential tool that top-level management in a company uses to implement its strategies.When a company uses the services of Mystery Shopping programs, it is not sufficient just to understand the company’s position in the market with customers or in comparison to their competitors. It is equally important to be mindful of the financial returns from their investments in their products or services and their customers’ satisfaction levels. They need appropriate statistical analysis data to understand if the implemented Mystery Shopping Programs are beneficial to the growth of their businesses. Here are few points to improve the ROI of your Mystery Shopping Program:
1.In a vast country like India, measurement of the effectiveness of products or services is a definite requirement. A proper measurement method or statistical tool has to be designed with which the sales of the products, employees’ efficiency, customers’ interests, etc., can be determined. Frequent numerical data results would help the top management to understand their current position and work on their future market plans.
2.Before hiring the services of a Mystery Shopping company, you have to first understand and focus on your key areas like the specific stores, your products or services, your competitor stores, and so on. Based on this, you can sit with the Mystery Shopping company and chalk out a program that would help in getting the required results.
3.Designing your Questionnaire according to your brand standards is another key factor to conduct Mystery Shopping programs. It is important to create an objective Questionnaire probably with more Yes/No questions which would give a realistic observation from the Mystery Shoppers. Unnecessary questions are to be avoided since they might detour from the factual information. Repetitive testing with the Questionnaire is mandatory to get a periodical analysis.
4.A company has to ensure that the Data and Reports collected from the Mystery Shopping Programs are authentic. For this, they have to check if trustworthy Mystery Shoppers are sent for audits and the same Shoppers are not sent frequently to the same stores. This would lead to repetitive or redundant information. The success rate of the Mystery Shopping company in the market can also be verified before they are hired.
5.It is important to combine the Mystery Shopping program or consumer satisfaction results with standard financial metrics. A company has to view its financial outcome from every location’s audit results. This would give the company an analysis of the highest ROI from each location. Also, this statistical data can help the top management to change or continue their business strategies both location-wise and store-wise.
6.Finally, the employees of a company have to be kept in the loop while conducting such Mystery Shopping Programs. They have to be made to understand the importance of achieving a 100% shop score and how beneficial this would be for both i.e., the business and the employees. When employees are motivated, their performance would also improve thus resulting in the overall productivity of the business and customer service.
aBOUT THE AUTHOR
Sanjeev Shenoy
Managing Director, HS Brands Asia
Sanjeev Shenoy has 15+ years’ experience in mystery shopping and customer experience and has helped several global brands design and manage programs across Asia. As a post-graduate in Management, he has worked in Marketing & Operations across retail and food and beverage. As a believer in the beginners’ mindset, Sanjeev seeks to bring in innovation in the mystery shopping industry through technology and best practices from other industries.
