Mystery shopping or rather, Customer Experience Evaluation, is a function that every business in every industry should be using in today’s economy.

Why? Quite simply because as markets become more competitive, customer service is more than likely your business’s major and most valuable asset. It is often the first one forgotten or overlooked as well.

If you are not able to give any customer who comes to your door, be it virtual or actual, the very best experience that they can have, there is a good chance that next time they are looking for your product or service, they will look for someone or somewhere that does.

Unless your business has a total monopoly, there is so much competition out there in every industry, be it restaurants, hotels, retail, wholesale, or any other service provided to a consumer, that they only one thing that can make you stand out from the competition is outstanding SERVICE.

Nowadays, especially in North America we are inundated and plagued by companies all wanting to gain not only our attention, but in turn our business, our trust and of course our money.

Service is the only way for you to stand out from the crowd. Service is most likely to bring a customer back to your door again as well as helping to bring in new customers by way of recommendations.

With the proliferation of social media available to all, if your customer posts or shares their phenomenal experience with their immediate social group, the results can and often do have an exponential effect.

When your business gains a customer and doesn’t give them an experience better than expected, you have done a disservice to your customer as well as yourself and your business. You also leave your business open to the downside of social media, and that is that people LOVE to share bad experiences with others. In fact bad experiences are shared much more often than good ones.

In this respect, many businesses in tourism for example don’t want to be party to web based so called ‘consumer advisor’ sites, as many just get bad reports rather than good.

Marketing in all forms gets attention, and it brings your customers to you. What you choose to do with them then, is often and sadly forgotten once you have ‘made the contact’. The only way to retain their business and to gain valuable reputation is to offer them a better experience than they expect, and of course deserve.

Remember: A bad reputation is easy to gain and difficult to lose. A good reputation is hard to gain and all too easy to lose.

That all being said, how does your company evaluate customer experience?

Many larger companies have a generally fairly annoying pop up on their websites asking for an evaluation. Does this work? Naturally to a point. Most of these small surveys ask specific questions to get the answers they want to hear. They tend most often to be very closed ended in their questioning, rather than asking for a true assessment. Therefore, they only get a tiny part of the picture.

Furthermore, how do you use assessment mentality to evaluate customers who see you face to face, or who experience your sales on a one to one basis? How do you know how good your sales people really are?

This is where the Customer Experience Evaluation comes in, and it is the only way to really hear about your customer’s true experience of your business.

Yes, everyone has heard of mystery shopping of course. However the problem with mystery shopping companies is most often the shoppers themselves! Most companies simply contract someone who just happens to live close to your business, and who has some time on their hands. In most cases anyone can register without any assessment of themselves, and their experience in customer service.

Our view of this is simply to correctly assess the sales experience, and the service that goes with it, the assessor MUST know what to expect! If they don’t, then how can they make a reasonable and educated assessment and evaluation?

That means that an assessor must be a person who can tell the difference. Not just someone looking for a part time job, trying to make an easy buck which is all too often the person who is asked to evaluate your business.

Customer Experience Assessment and Evaluation is something that must therefore be undertaken only by a trained and experienced professional who has seen and expects the very best or as said before can tell the difference.

In a true sales situation for example, how can one know how good a salesperson is unless they are a highly trained sales professional themselves? For instance, how can someone without sales training tell if a close has been missed? Or how effective the trial closes have been, or even if there were any?

Many people don’t enjoy finding the downside of an experience and don’t like confrontation. Therefore often the assessment is swayed in favor of a good experience rather than finding the weak points.

This is where we come in.

With over 35 years of sales experience in multiple industries, markets, countries and businesses, we can offer you an unparalleled and extensive sales professionalism which we believe is unequaled in this field today.

We have an ever increasing portfolio of businesses, products, markets and situations, and most importantly we have the experience to tell the difference, the wisdom to know better, and the integrity to give you the best, most comprehensive assessment and valuation you will find today, regardless of your company profile.

Currently we have assessed businesses in the following categories:

• Retail (many different categories)
• Wholesale
• Automotive
• Restaurants
• Bars
• Hotels (a speciality)
• Phone centers
• Art dealers
• Recreation centers, including gyms
• Supermarkets

We are obviously adding to these diverse businesses daily, and love to assess categories that we have not assessed previously.

If you own, run or manage a business which has an interaction with a customer, and have never had an evaluation of your sales and customer service, don’t you think that you owe it to yourself and your business to truly see how good your team is?

If you want a true, realistic, unbiased and usable evaluation of your sales process at any juncture, regardless of the product or service you are supplying, you really need to contact us now for a preliminary meeting at no charge.

We will assess your business, and between us come up with a satisfactory implementation plan that will provide you with another key towards your success.

After all, your best customers are the ones who come back. We aim to help you keep them coming back.