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Internet Mystery Shopping – How Should You Choose a Mystery Shopping Agency?
There are of course, many mystery shopping agencies that will sell you their bells and whistles approach, whereby ‘experienced’ researchers will descend on a business and collect information relating to products and services.
If we consider the cost base on this factor alone, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that it is out of reach for most ‘new’ and ‘growing’ companies. However, without some kind of customer feedback mechanism profitable growth can be limited by bad service and poor customer perception.
Today, so much money is spent on sales and marketing, but the importance of the customers’ perception can easily become forgotten. Bad customer perception is like having the taps open in a sink with no plug. Then there's the unrelenting 'sales push. 'Sales/telesales people targeted with more and more conversions, high advertising budgets with little evaluation of their effectiveness. All of these things cost businesses’ money.
What if customer satisfaction could be measured almost immediately after the sale? Most businesses record lost sales, but they don’t have an effective way of measuring lost incremental sales.
Spending money on a structured approach, with all the associated costs and resource doesn’t seem like a very ‘lean’ way of operating in this day and age. Customer feedback simply can’t be measured effectively when very high transaction volumes are made over a short space of time. Things can get missed, customers are unhappy and sales are lost. It can be difficult to actually measure the impact on the bottom line.
It is very clear that keeping close to your customers and allowing the ones that want to ‘feedback’ to your business can do so in a timely and efficient manner is absolute key to any business that wants to be the best in its class. Getting the right feedback from customers could spell the end for the traditional mystery shopping agency.
When was the last time you had a service issue and tried to contact the ‘right person’? How long did it take? And how did you feel at the end of it? Wouldn’t it have felt great to contribute as an internet mystery shopper?
Good customer perception builds sales, and even in this modern age, there is still no better form of advertising than “word of mouth”. So why not just invite your customers to show you what they think?
David Hallett has worked with several large UK companies in senior customer management positions. An alternative method of internet mystery shopping can be found at http://www.wizper.com
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