Knowing your sales team’s strengths and weaknesses and understanding your business’ best sales performance techniques as well as its shortcomings are vital to becoming a market front runner. But how do you gain unbiased access to this critical data? That’s where mystery shopping comes in.
You might be surprised to learn that mystery shopping isn’t just about having a professional shopper hit the sales floor in person like a walk-in customer. Mystery shopping can involve an array of “shopping” techniques for evaluating sales performance.
Are you looking to gain insight for a team-wide sales performance evaluation? Do you want to see how the “live chat” feature on your website is working? Clear Evaluations offers a number of mystery shopping programs to meet customer needs and sales goals.
Check out these three alternative mystery shops and how they can benefit your business:
Phone Shops
Companies in a wide range of industries conduct a sizeable amount of business over the phone. A phone mystery shop can help you evaluate how your employees handle these customer interactions.
Are they professional, engaging, and helpful? Are they trying to upsell products, schedule on-site appointments, or invite customers to visit retail locations? And, critically, are they gathering customers’ names and contact information for follow up?
Phone mystery shops tend to be more common for call centers or telemarketing businesses. But industries that require staff to frequently engage with clients over the phone to provide service or generate sales can also benefit from mystery shopping. Examples include travel and hospitality businesses, insurance agencies, automotive dealerships, and legal offices.
Internet Shops
In a world where customers demand immediate attention, particularly if they’re making inquiries using features on your website (like customer service queries or live chat), quick and effective responses are critical to maintaining a competitive edge in your business.
An Internet mystery shop lets you see how efficiently your customer service team responds to web-based form submissions and live chats. An instantaneous and accurate response to an Internet inquiry could mean the difference between winning new customers and losing them to the competition.
Typically the mystery shop assesses how responsive your company is online, evaluates your website’s user experience, or provides intel on how your team interacts with users on social media. By evaluating your overall digital experience, Internet mystery shops can help you dominate the online space.
Follow-Up Shops
To close sales, your team must be serious about following up with prospects. Yet for some sales teams, sending a concise but effective follow-up email or voice mail is a struggle. Either their subject line is all wrong, their wording is off, or they’re sending it at the wrong time.
Clear Evaluations offers a follow-up shop service where all voicemails and emails from your sales staff to the mystery shopper go into an easy-to-access web-based survey you can review. This allows you to monitor your sales team’s follow-up habits and give them greater insight into what’s working and what’s falling flat.
In today’s world, companies need more than just a quality product or service to succeed. Mystery shops that review your sales team’s phone habits, your business’s digital presence, and your sales representatives’ follow-up skills can help take your company to the next level.
