Mystery Shopper Program

An element critical to implementing an effective Mystery Shopper Program is determining who will be conducting the evaluations. While utilizing contract shoppers (individuals who are hired specifically to pose as customers while completing the evaluations) can provide insight as to sales aptitudes, product knowledge and compliance issues, many banks are turning to their own customer base as a source for service evaluation participants.

The insight that is provided by a customer-driven shopping process goes far beyond the scope of traditional shopping programs and offers these key advantages:

* Feedback comes directly from the customers' perspective.

* Employees are less likely to identify evaluators.

* Because shopping assignments coincide with the shoppers' routine banking business, there are fewer logistical concerns.

* It is often more cost-effective to use existing bank clients than to have professional shoppers.

* By conducting evaluations, customers increase their awareness of the bank's product offerings. They often open additional accounts as a result of their experiences as a service evaluator. Carefully recruiting and training customer participants provides a powerful information system that accurately reflects the individuality of each local market area.

Survey design is another important element in developing an effective shopping program. Questions must be easily understood. Avoid lengthy sentences, ambiguity or leading questions. Keep it objective, simple and relevant to the program's objectives.

Once written, pretest the survey to make sure it is user friendly, reflects the customer's definition of quality service and provides appropriate scoring options. Since this is another stage where errors are often discovered, it presents an opportunity to modify survey content to maximize the quality of data collection.

A one-time-only or infrequent shopping service is not enough to gain an accurate evaluation of performance. Rather, it provides only a limited snapshot, at best, and may actually give an unfair impression of performance levels. Only by regularly measuring staff performance with a continuous mystery shopping process, can a reliable measure of staff proficiency be determined.

In fact, industry statistics show that financial institutions that have implemented ongoing shopping programs have raised their level of performance more than 20 percent in a 15-month period. Those with sporadic programs have only small gains.

Greg Koepel, director of human resources at Mid Wisconsin bank in Medford, Wis., agrees. "We conduct mystery shopping in each branch every month. That way, as trends develop, we are able to focus in on specific areas in need of attack or provide positive recognition to those delivering stellar performance."

Mystery Shopping |