Encourage employees to buy into mystery shopping results

It is very common seeing front-line employees have issues with Mystery Shopping (MS) results , as they may have attitude the MS is an activity that intend to “find fault” of their service activity, then led to some kind of warning and punishment from the management if they fail standards. As a result, many of MS program failed to fulfill its objective to improve service quality of its client organization but only create new (and strange) employee behviour that employees “tend” to find their own tricks to recognize the mystery shopper and then “pretend” to provide super excellent service just hoping to receive excellent score. This is sad but true as still happening in some business sectors. After we have worked with this kind of problem for many years, these approaches are recommended to avoid this kind of situation….

Opportunity to meet with the provider

Allow team members (or team heads) to meet with your MS service provider’s representative. To have, from time to time, a group meeting is a great opportunity to share, emphasize the objective of the program as well as feedback from front line employees towards the mystery shopper program. This kind of mutual relationship would help employees to have more understanding and reduce pressure of being evaluated by the mystery shopper. The flaw of this approach that a group meeting may lead the confusing in terms of communication between representative of both sides, all managers afterwards try to contact provider’s representative for their concerns, only make sure you still remain the communication in order just to avoid communication problem.

Opportunity to get involve and feedback

Service standards are usually designed by the management or team’s head. But would be a great benefit if front-line employees could be involve or offered opportunity to feedback on management’s decision. They may have other good opinion in terms of front line operations to improve the company’s service standard, make it more practical, for example. If, it is, however, not the case for front-line employees are able to feedback, only make sure they are fully aware of what you (as the management) expect them to achieve. This would be reducing pressure from employees on being audited by the mystery shopper.

No punishment, but reward.

Front-line employees should have no punishment on failing any of the service standards evaluated by the mystery shopper. This is very critical that many organisations failed to inform their employee, though the punishment scheme never exists from the beginning. The clear communication still must be made before MS program executed. Many times, in MS report, failed standards appears with their names, this is also has to be mentioned that it was just specific training needs, not for punishment. Sometimes rewarding could be offered for excellent performer.

Avoid use only MS for their KPI.

There are several key components for employee’s KPI. Some organisations, especially ones with limited budget rely only one KPI element, for example, MS result or Customer Satisfaction Survey. Having more KPI components would reduce employee’s pressure as they have clear understanding the organisation’s objective and fair assessment of their service activity.