Mystery Shopping: Assessing and Training Your Team

By David Young

The key to effective, ongoing sales training is fully understanding exactly where the strengths and weaknesses of your team are.  Unfortunately, the busy sales manager or business owner isn’t always present in the store to evaluate the performance of each salesperson. Even if you are in the store, your team will be on their best behavior – which does not provide an accurate reflection of the quality of their day to day operations.  Furthermore, how are you to know if your recent training program has taken effect on the shop floor?

Without a targeted approach, it may be difficult to paint a realistic picture of your sales team’s high and low points, which directly affect your store’s profitability. Mystery shopping is the ideal way to find out exactly how your sales team is performing.

How does mystery shopping work?
Mystery shopping uses various approaches to assess the performance of a sales or service team. Usually, an organization arranges for an external company to carry out phone calls and/or visits. These calls and visits usually take place without the knowledge of the staff. Mystery shoppers adhere to a firm set of criteria determined with the client previous to the assessment.
Several general points of mystery shopping analysis include how the customer is greeted interviewed, pitched and closed; the etiquette, friendliness, and grooming of the sales person; the appearance of the store, compliance with company standards, and the speed and efficiency of service.
Before working with a mystery shopping company, many wireless retail owners and managers should consider mystery shopping their direct competitors. This a clever way to reassess your organization’s previous performance benchmarks, as well as optimize the criteria used in analyzing your in-house sales staff.

What are the benefits of mystery shopping to my store?

• Be Present, Even When You Can’t

Mystery shopping gives you the proverbial “eyes in the back of your head.” Managers and owners are often off premises dealing with other issues or retail outlets. However, you have more than likely wondered what exactly is happening in your store in your absence, especially on nights and weekends. While you can’t be everywhere all the time, mystery shopping gets you a little closer to being omnipresent.

• Improve Your Training

While you may implement continuous training and improvement programs, it is often difficult to see if your efforts are paying off. Are the techniques and points you are teaching actually being used in the showroom? What is being forgotten? Which areas can use further practice? Mystery shopping gives owners and managers the opportunity to gain some distance from the store and get an objective, unbiased analysis of the effectiveness of existing training programs.

• Get an Edge on the Competition

Mystery shopping your competition allows you to see what exactly other stores are offering and how effective their sales team is in delivering their product. More importantly, however, it is also a chance to see what the competition is saying about your organization, products, and services. This knowledge is an important tool in training your salespeople. If you are aware of what the competitor is saying, you can coach your staff to refute these statements.

• Catch Your Staff Getting It Right

The tool of mystery shopping does not have to be a game of cat and mouse. Its purpose is far from merely finding weak points, as many in your sales staff may feel. Mystery shopping is actually an opportunity to catch your employees excelling at their jobs and making the most of the training you have given them. Seeing a salesperson’s strong points will not only allow you to recognize their talents and praise their performance, but it will also help you further tailor their training.

• Celebrate Your Strengths and Correct Your Weaknesses

Sales representatives performing at the top of their games deserve some recognition within the organization, just as employees with deficiencies need encouragement and targeted training. Mystery shopping ultimately enables you to celebrate staff and stores performing to the expected standard, as well as identify outlets in need of improvement. Praise effective stores just as much, if not more, than weaker ones and then take appropriate, corrective actions.

Mystery shopping is one of the most effective tools for examining your store’s performance, or lack thereof, in your absence. It is a smart business technique that provides accurate, unbiased feedback on how your store fares and competitors operate, how the customer is treated, and how sales are occuring. Without this valuable means of evaluation, managers and shop owners are effectively wasting their training dollars and their potential profits.

David Young  is Director - Technology Store Shopper of Retail at Retail Business Development (RBD). RBD is a premier provider of retail management outsourcing, consulting and training services for the wireless industry serving wireless carriers, master agents and independent cellular dealers. For more information visit www.retailbusinessdevelopment.com or call 866.869.6975

Back >