Undercover boss: How to mystery shop your business to improve results

Mystery shopping has been around since the 1940s, first created to sniff out employees in the banking sector with sticky fingers. 

Since then it has evolved into understanding what it feels like to be a customer in your business. 

These insights help you to develop, test and deliver experiences worthy of customer loyalty, in turn deriving higher profits, better employee experiences and industry leading customer experiences. Research has demonstrated that poor customer service costs Australian businesses up to $8bn a year.

So how do you mystery shop your business? Size matters. The larger your organisation, the more resources you are going to need, but these three steps will get you started.

1. Clearly understand your customer journey

As the customer service leader for Officeworks, Australia, one of my first projects was to overhaul how we measured the customer experience in store and online. What that meant was becoming crystal clear about the touch points a customer would inevitably experience during a standard visit to Officeworks.

The easiest way to do this (no matter your organisation’s size) is to create a customer experience journey map, covering their interactions with your employees and business. This can be completed in a simple excel spreadsheet, but my personal favourite is with basic butchers paper and sticky notes. 

Fill out the sections and create a clear view of the touchpoints your customers experience: 

• What’s going through their head?
• Where are you winning?
• Where are your opportunities to do better?
• How are you moving them through each stage of their journey?

2. Understand the behaviours that you should expect to see at each touchpoint

With each touchpoint that you have established, you then need to state what the expected behaviours are to support that touch point being the best it can be. 

This is what will then make up your mystery shopping metrics. 

For example, at Bunnings, the team was measured on acknowledging a customer within 60 seconds. 

After doing the customer journey mapping activity as the customer insights manager for Australia and later New Zealand, I learnt that this did not make for the best experience when customers entered the store. If anything, it left them feeling neglected, not a priority or simply not wanted. 

This was far from the truth, so we established what we needed to achieve: acknowledgement within 30 sec.

The specific metric for the team became:

‘Need to acknowledge the customer within 30 seconds. This can include a verbal hello/greeting, a non-verbal but visible greeting e.g., a wave, a head nod, a smile.’

Then, we applied a measurement: 5% of the total score. 

The key here is being specific and challenging behaviours, not measuring intentions. When we do this, we get transparency around what actually happened, not what we wish would happen.

3. Track and measure the results to drive improvements

So, you have a set of behaviours and outcomes you want to measure. You’ve found an inconspicuous friend, maybe hired a professional mystery shopping service provider, or donned a wig and prosthetic nose yourself to measure the customer experience you want to learn more about.

Your next move is to create a culture in which you encourage consistent improvement by finding ways to make change and innovation in your customer experience the norm.

This means understanding your customer journey, and then helping your team understand the behaviours that are required to achieve those customer journey goals.

I personally prescribe to role playing in these teaching situations as it helps the team gain empathy for the customer and provide feedback on how certain behaviours feel.

Once you’ve collated the mystery shopping results and shared them with your team, ask your team for their personal insights into the results. 

Personally, I like the traffic light system. What must stop (red), what was a potential challenge to gaining better results (orange) and what helped us win (green). 

You should be able to find feedback from other areas within your business as well. Customers should start to remark positively on their shopping experience, while there may be a change in your customer’s average spend, or a change in your team morale, or number of return customers.

This verbal and non-verbal feedback is a way to measure the return on investment that you are putting into improving the customer service experience. 

Recognise your wins, not just your opportunities to improve

Some leaders might prescribe to the fact that their team doesn’t need to be recognised just for doing their job. Employers who take the time to show their team that they care, and are engaged in their employee’s experience and development, are likely to find a much more loyal workforce.

Recognising the wins doesn’t necessitate massive bonuses or elaborate lunches, it could simply be an individual handwritten card of thanks and appreciation. They might accumulate donations to their social club, or a personalised video of thanks from the leadership team customised to their location. 

The possibilities are endless, but the crucial piece to incremental improvement is remembering to celebrate the wins, otherwise your team is no longer motivated to sustain the change.  

Find the people who will help you champion a stronger customer experience because you will certainly come up against those who feel hard done by in the mystery shopping process at one time or another. No one likes to be told they didn’t live up to expectations.

There will be those who claim it is not conceivable to expect the behaviours you expect, but remember, we’re doing this to become the best, not just OK. 

Find your customer experience influencers and customer-loving champions early. Let them help you evolve the thinking from: she’ll be right, I’ll say hi to them in a minute, to values thinking where they empathise with the customer. It’s about wanting to do the right thing because that’s the experience they’d want to have, not because it gets measured now.

As you do this activity more and more (and I would recommend that it become at least a monthly occurrence) you will start to see some consistent insights being on the customer service experience your team is delivering over time. 

There are certainly going to be aspects that are going to require improvements and that’s OK! That is the point of these activities, to learn about our opportunities to do and be better.

It’s going to take consistency on your part as the leader to influence incremental change.