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Absolutely. Mystery Shopping is a great way to track whether your staff is indeed adhering to your prescribed service standards or not. It is especially effective for franchise businesses where the franchisee has to adhere to the franchisor's (or the brand's) set business standards. A good Mystery Shopping programme will include:
1. A prescribed Customer Experience Blueprint - where all business standards are set out
2. Trained Mystery Shoppers - people who are familiar with the blueprint and know what to look out for
3. A good management tool - what happens after the mystery shopper has investigated the store? The programme must be accompanied by a tool (e.g. customer service dashboard) that will help management track the business' performance over time
4. (Optional, but highly recommended: A continuous training system where the areas of poor service that are identified in the dashboard are fixed)
I do accept a Mystery shopper will be much helpfull for better monitiring method. Why because in large public sector services like banking, hospitals, mall etc people do not discuss the negatives of those sectors infront of all. Every individual use to discuss the issuse when some one raises a topic or else some have a problem regarding some service. Most of these sort of discussions were held at corners or outside. So the opinion of the public may not be possible to reach the top management . Although every service starts there service / provides services after a complete syudy but it is quite different after the service has been started. Many issues and negotiations comes in between. So if a particular Employee was engaged professionally for that work, management will come to know the requirements of the public / customers of there needs rather than provided by the particular sector.