Mystery Shopping
Kinēsis employs a purchase intent and loyalty based approach to mystery shop program design. Our unique approach allows our clients to identify and reinforce sales and service behaviors that matter most – those which drive purchase intent and loyalty. As a result, our clients can focus training, coaching, incentives, and other motivational tools directly on the elements of the customer experience that matter the most – those which will produce the largest return on investment.
Mystery Shopping Objectives
Managers of sales and service brands need answers to challenging research questions. When clients need to know specific information about their service delivery, Kinēsis provides answers. How many of the following research needs relate to your situation?
| ## When Our Clients Want to Know… | ## Kinēsis Helps Them… |
| How well do our employees meet our service standards? | Align shopping programs with company service standards. |
| How well do our standards meet the service expectations of our customers? | Align company standards with customer expectations. |
| How can we coach or motivate employees to meet service standards? | Align employees with service standards. |
| How have customers’ experiences with our company’s service changed over time? | Track improvement and maintain a consistent customer experience over time. |
| How does customers’ experience with retail service influence their intention to make a purchase? | Identify service standards and behaviors that will drive purchase behaviors and maximize ROI of the customer experience. Use the customer experience as a driver of profitability. |
| What causes our customers to have positive or negative shopping experiences? | Obtain actionable information to improve the customer experience. |
| How well does our customer service compare to that of competitors throughout our industry? | Benchmark their customer service against the competition. |
| Which employees and sales operations provide the best service? Generate the most revenue? | Identify leaders or role models within their service organization. Make strategic decisions about resource allocation. |
| Would these employees and operations be effective role models? How would we know? | Position top performers as role models and use their experience throughout the organization. |
| What combination of training, compensation, or other investment results in the largest increases in per-employee revenue? | Manage the customer experience from a global context to maximize ROI. |
Types of Shops
Before discussing how we provide this road map, it is instructive to consider how brands use mystery shopping. Just about any channel in the brand-customer interface can be shopped at any point in the customer journey. Some of the types of shops include:
In Person:
While distribution channels shift to more self-administered on-line channels, in many industries the in-person channel continues to be the embodiment of the brand – central to a multichannel strategy. This role will put new pressures on store personnel as brand advocates. In-person mystery shopping evaluates and motivates sales and service behaviors as part of this role.
Contact Center:
Contact center mystery shopping provides managers a unique opportunity to evaluate the customer experience using predetermined scenarios. Most contact centers employ call monitoring to evaluate agent performance. Best in class mystery shopping programs augment call monitoring by giving managers a tool to present specific scenarios to agents to test their performance.
Internal Shops:
Internal shops evaluate service provided to internal customers to identify internal bottlenecks which may hinder the ability to provide optimal customer service.
Web/Mobile Shops:
Across many industries, self-administered channels are increasingly becoming key to opening and deepening the customer relationship. Mystery shopping website and mobile channels provide managers tools to test ease of use, navigation and the overall customer experience of online and mobile channels.
Life Cycle Shops:
Life cycle mystery shops are designed to evaluate the customer experience through the entire customer journey across a variety of delivery channels, and a spectrum of transactions, over an extended period of time.
Competitive Shops:
Shopping competitors allows customer experience managers to benchmark their brand-customer interface relative to their competitors.
Program Design
Kinēsis works jointly with each client to design a questionnaire which will best meet their needs.
Typically, questionnaire design includes observations of objective behaviors, subjective impressions and comments, each serving a specific purpose in identifying specific employee behaviors which drive profitability. Together, these three elements of questionnaire design reveal the “what”, “how” and “why” of the customer experience.
Objective Behaviors:
Observations of objective behaviors form the backbone of Kinēsis’ mystery shop methodology. These observations identify what specific sales and service behaviors were observed. Mystery shopping is primarily an observational form of research, and as such, a best practice is to focus on objective observations of specific behaviors. These observations serve two purposes. First, they measure and motivate expected sales and service behaviors. Second, they serve as a foundation for Kinēsis’ Purchase Intent and Loyalty Analysis methodology, which in conjunction with the following subjective elements of the study design, determine the relationship between specific behaviors and purchase intent.
Subjective Impressions:
Subjective impressions are primarily captured through scientifically designed and strategically selected rating scales. These questions tell us how the shopper felt about the experience. They add both quantitative and qualitative perspective to the objective behaviors observed and provide a basis for interpretation of not only individual shops, but provide the analytical means to determine the relationship between each service behavior and purchase intent and loyalty.
Subjective Comments:
Beyond measuring what behaviors were observed and how the shopper felt about the experience, open-ended comments are used to capture why shoppers felt the way they did about the experience. While objective behaviors are the backbone of the shop, many of our clients consider these comments the heart of the shop; they provide a qualitative texture to understand specifically what the shopper felt about the experience. They not only serve as a framework for understanding each shop individually, but provide input into Kinēsis’ content analysis methodology to determine key qualitative drivers of purchase intent.
Together, these three design elements provide input into Kinēsis’ proprietary key driver purchase intent and loyalty analysis technique to identify key sales and service drivers of purchase intent and loyalty.
Purchase Intent & Loyalty Based Analysis
Research without a call to action may be informative, but not very useful. Kinēsis builds call to action elements into our research design, which provide a road map for clients to maximize the ROI on customer experience measurement.
Kinēsis’ approach to mystery shopping is designed to identify key sales and service behaviors with a desired customer experience outcome. This Key Driver Analysis determines the relationship between specific behaviors and a desired outcome. For most clients the desired outcomes are purchase intent and loyalty. As a result, our approach helps clients identify and reinforce sales and service behaviors which drive intent to either enter into, or maintain, a relationship with a brand.