How to give mystery shopping feedback to your team

Mystery shopping can be a valuable tool in understanding how individuals experience your brand as a customer.

From highlighting areas where you may need to improve, to providing a way of rewarding your employees, mystery shopping allows you to get the outside view of your performance.

However, at a time where staff retention is vital, it’s important that how you feedback to your team is carefully considered.

Creating a culture where feedback from mystery shopping is valued and not feared will ensure that you create not just an excellent customer experience, but also a workplace that people enjoy.

Best forum to discuss feedback

Mystery shopping can get a bit of a bad rep amongst employees when feedback is badly handled.

But by building an open, honest, and receptive way of providing feedback you can win them over and turn it into a positive.

For top level results, creating something that gives your entire team ownership such as monthly results meetings, putting the report on to your intranet or sending via email can work well.

Where there are training needs specific to a single employee, a one-to-one approach is best and helps to avoid singling out an individual for negative feedback.

Be specific in next steps

One of the biggest benefits of mystery shopping is that it allows you to provide quick and relevant feedback for your team members. However, providing feedback alone when a customer has not perhaps been given the best experience will not answer underlying issues.

Therefore, it’s vital to have a framework that ensures you have clear next steps whether the feedback is excellent, or not quite what you would expect.

Creating a policy or general framework will allow you to ensure that you apply feedback results fairly and consistently across your teams.

Some of the next steps you may take could include:

• Further customer service training
• Specific product/service training
• A quick catch up
• Mentoring
• Rewarding
• Deductions
• Performance management

It’s worth considering what type of score or feedback would trigger each of the actions above and having this as a written policy, so your teams know what to expect.

Consider how you reward excellent customer service

All too often the emphasis on feedback is on those who perhaps haven’t performed quite to the standard that you had hoped.

But if you focus only on negatives and overlook the positives, you can create a work environment which is stressful and leads to high staff turnover. Consider how you can use mystery shopping as part of your employee rewards initiative.

Rewards by no means need to be financial. Simply being open to celebrating a job well done can help to motivate staff.

If you’re considering using mystery shopping for your business, get in touch to discover how we can help.