Finishing time：2016/3/4 11:51:48 Announcer：TRISEARCHER
Presently there’re many method to test and improve service provided by companies. Customer survey is only one of them which are widely used. However, there’re some flaws in this method. Firstly, the survey lacks objectivity since it contains contents that can be planned beforehand. In this article, we’ll contrast customer survey with mystery shopping. Have you noticed there’re some problems existed in your company? Does your customer base shrink due to some reasons? If you have some doubts regarding how your employees behave towards consumers at the counter or on telephone, we could provide you lots of ways to discover the truth. You can freely choose to use customer survey or mystery shopping service.
If you choose the former, you have to distribute questionnaire to your customers regarding the service they received from your stores. However, not all stores will keep record of the data provided by their customers. Therefore, mystery shopping is the best choice for them.
Consumers will receive questionnaire after service or when they decide not to accept any service provided by your stores, however, mystery shopping can prevent problems from happening before they appear. The shoppers will pay close attention to your business and any negative issues, and they will report to you objectively. It can prevent problems from worsening and help companies find solutions before things going out of control. You don’t need to spend extra time and energy in designing and producing questionnaire, which is also cost-saving to companies. In addition, you don’t need to count on customers who have complaints to reply questionnaires in time.
Some scholars may think that through questionnaire, the data could be collected to make a form, which is helpful to analyze behavior and habit of employees. There’s a hypothesis that some staffs perform badly all the time, then questionnaire will lose its significance if employees behave badly each time. However, some customers might consider a staff to be a very good salesman, on the other hand, other ones hold exactly opposite opinions. From this perspective, customers may have some divergence regarding the evaluation of certain staffs. The difference on opinion may distort report, and may wrongly give positive feedback to some unworthy staffs. In contrast, mystery shoppers will keep an eye on the tested staffs at fixed period, and report to companies of reality.
This secret activity is mainly used to observe and report in an unbiased way. Shoppers can help to discover problems and methods to reorganize the company. Different with other customers who hold divergent opinions, these “invisible” observers can take control, and use the controlled data and document to set up database in order to give feedback. Therefore, the source of problems will then be found. No questionnaire can have this effect. Each questionnaire is a feedback from different level of customers of different degree of accuracy, while the mystery shopper will view problems from perspectives of salesperson and company employees. It’s like you have 100 employees in your company. It’s impossible to ask customers to evaluate a certain staff, however, with mystery shopping, one can easily realize it, which is also an important reason mystery shopping is superior to questionnaire.
