.png)
A telephone mystery shop is an alternate take on an in-person evaluation, allowing another perspective on your business. Even in a world driven by online capabilities, a customer’s first point of contact is often a reliable phone call. Therefore, this interaction is still extremely important for your business to get right.
A forward-thinking business owner should consider a telephone mystery shop essential in their toolbox of helpful CX solutions. This is particularly true when establishing lasting customer satisfaction from each interaction. During this process, you’ll assess how effective your staff is at handling inquiries, solving problems, and creating a seamless experience. Thus, you can lead actionable changes in your business processes with the insights gained.
Are you ready to discover how effective your team is when the phone rings?
Like your typical customer service (CX) evaluation, a telephone mystery shop evaluates your business from different aspects of your call-in customer journey.
Ideally, the first place to start is by determining your company goals. The target of your shop can vary depending on what you’re looking to achieve. From there, the evaluator performing your review uses a checklist or questionnaire to grade various interactions and business operations over the phone. Once completed, they will finalize their feedback and provide you with a report with their insights. Afterward, you can take the data and start your analysis to determine next steps.
Understanding your strengths and weaknesses will help you meet company goals by building an effective business strategy. The more you can meet—and exceed—the needs of your customers while refining your operations, the more successful your business can be.
Regardless of whether your business relies heavily on phone interactions or simply uses them as a form of supporting communication, it’s worth having an evaluation. Let’s dive into several benefits that will enhance customer satisfaction and staff performance.
Likely, your first thought when considering a telephone mystery shop is to evaluate the initial impression the staff member gives. These first moments are critical to how your customers see your brand and greatly influence how they deal with your business in the future. Conducting a CX evaluation can help you understand how well your staff members handle speaking to your customers from the very beginning.
In fact, CX evaluations provide insight into how quickly the phone is picked up. Most companies train their employees to pick up the phone before the third ring, if placed on hold, and answer with a specific greeting. For example, you may have them greet customers on the phone with their name, an appreciation for calling, the company name, and other information. Your evaluator will note how responsive your team is and might include how they were greeted.
Similarly, they might evaluate how effectively the phone operator handles inquiries or issues—and if it’s done promptly. In this situation, a telephone mystery shop can give you plenty of information regarding these fundamental customer interactions.
An additional benefit is that a CX evaluation can give you insights into your employees’ knowledge of your offerings and their effectiveness in upselling other services. As such, it’s imperative to be able to trust your staff to handle customer inquiries quickly and with ease. Customers will be more interested in your services or products if your employees can confidently discuss them. This will effectively build a sense of trust in both your brand and your employees.
As this trust builds, your employees can upsell or cross-sell products based on the customer's needs or interests. By conducting a telephone mystery shop, you can gauge the effort put into these sales opportunities. In addition, you gain insights into how your staff handles objections, how well they are able to close the deal, and how they navigate the sales process over the phone.
Above all, a telephone mystery shop can help your business with this beneficial data. Simply put, reviewing your sales techniques can give you insights into how effective your team is. Plus, this can reveal areas where training is missing or needs to be expanded upon.
Finally, our third benefit might be the most important on our list of reasons to conduct a telephone mystery shop. The reputation of your brand is essential—and it has a huge effect on how new customers see you. More specifically, it can determine if they’ll consider shopping with you. With that in mind, evaluating whether your employees follow your company guidelines, policies, and procedures during customer calls is critical. This can also include compliance with regulatory or other legal requirements.
Additionally, this gives you some insight into how your employees use their problem-solving skills, especially when faced with objections. It’s not unusual for customers to get upset when faced with specific policies that prevent their needs from being met. For example, a customer might be trying to get information on making a return when they are informed it is past the return date. How will your staff handle this customer's negative reaction? Learning how your employees handle these issues—and if they can effectively de-escalate conflict—is a crucial insight that can help you improve your business.
Overall, while this isn’t an extensive list of benefits you can receive, it provides you with great information on how your business is being handled. Knowing more about your operations and how customers experience your brand can help you in the long run.
If you think it’s time to take the next step and conduct your telephone mystery shop, you might wonder how to begin. Let's go through the steps so you can get those business insights and refine your processes.
The first step begins with choosing one or more goals. This will vary depending on what concerns or questions you might have. For example, you might have seen an increase in negative reviews and need to uncover the truth. With this in mind, base your strategy on your goal or goals to give yourself a starting point.
Your next step utilizes your goals and strategy to map out your questionnaire or evaluation checklist. With that said, choose relevant and targeted questions that give you trackable data. Consider the process your customer takes when they call your business, then base your choices on those steps. Also, it’s a good idea to plan an exit strategy for your mystery shopper, providing them with different scenarios to conclude the call naturally. Ideally, this strategy won’t end up creating a situation that requires follow-up actions.
Once you’ve completed your checklist or questionnaire, it’s time to find an unbiased source to conduct the evaluation. Keep in mind, it’s essential that your staff doesn’t know or recognize this person as someone with a connection to your business. This could also cause some bias when gathering feedback. Give this person guidance on the process and answer any questions they might have. Also, encourage them to do their research in case this is their first telephone mystery shop.
Next, your telephone mystery shop inspector will set aside time to call your business. During their evaluation, they will take notes and act naturally so as not to bring attention to who they are. Once they complete their call, it’s important that they make any final notes while the interaction is fresh. It’s helpful to make observations on any kind of notable behavior, even during goodbyes. Moreover, it’s essential that their notes are clear, objective, and reflective of the entire experience.
Following the conclusion of the call, have your telephone mystery shop evaluator finalize their report with any additional comments they deem important. They should submit their report as soon as possible so they don’t miss any details and glaring problems can be addressed quickly. Again, their feedback should come from an unbiased standpoint regarding the whole experience.
Once you’ve received the feedback from the telephone mystery shop, it’s time to analyze the data. With your goals in mind, review the feedback from your evaluator and determine where your strengths and weaknesses are. That way, as you compare your business strategy to these insights, you’ll get an idea of what your actionable step-by-step plan can be. Begin drafting your improvement plan and how to involve and delegate to your employees. Also, it’s a good idea to set measurable goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) to track your progress so you can see how things improve over time.
Finally, it’s time to take your plan and put it into action. Communicate the plan to your employees, including the timeline and your goals. With that said, it’s good to be open to communication from your team members and allow them a voice amid these changes. If applicable, offer targeted training to all employees and ongoing workshops for continuous improvement.
Indeed, it’s a good idea to continuously reevaluate your plans to track the progress of your implemented changes. You can even schedule a follow-up telephone mystery shop to evaluate after your changes have been in effect.
While the benefits of a telephone mystery shop can have undeniable value, you might find conducting one yourself a bit overwhelming. Of course, after reading all the steps it takes to implement a successful program, it can appear to be costly—in both time and resources. If you’re hoping there’s a better way to get all the benefits without the extra work on the front end…
In just 10 minutes, you can set up a high-quality telephone mystery shop program for one or more of your business locations. How does it work?
Our reports are sent within 72 hours following your telephone mystery shop, and contain invaluable information. These reports are packed with actionable business insights from your shop and reviewed by our expert quality assurance team. Certainly, conducting an evaluation is an excellent tool for any savvy business owner looking to stay competitive.
In conclusion, a telephone mystery shop is a powerful tool for gaining fresh insights into how your business handles one of the most critical customer touchpoints: the telephone. Even in today’s online world, many customers still prefer calling to inquire or resolve issues, making it crucial to deliver a seamless and positive experience from that very first interaction. By evaluating how well your team manages customer calls, you can identify strengths, pinpoint areas for improvement, and ultimately drive lasting customer satisfaction.
So, are you ready to take the next step in ensuring your phone interactions exceed customer expectations?
.svg){kind=icon}
