Measuring the Execution of Strategy
One of the biggest fears of many executives is that the strategy isn’t executed as intended. It’s a long way from the corporate board room to the cashier desk, operated by a young part-time employee.
We’ll leave the strategy to you, and besides, the world has plenty of strategy experts. We created service Integrity to measure the exact places where the business is operating differently from the strategy.
The Service and Sales provided by staff have to be in line with the strategy. Everyone’s actions must be true to the strategy; they must have integrity, which is why we called our company Service Integrity.
Who’s Mystery Shopping for?
Any organisation can use Mystery Shoppers, but it might be easier to use friends and family in some cases. We service organisations with a large footprint over many customer interactions.
Setting up a program requires considerable resources, making it difficult for smaller companies to justify the cost. Once a company has 20 sites, the math starts to work in favour of mystery shopping.
How do you source mystery shoppers?
We’ve built up a great diversity and depth of shoppers over 20 years. But we continue to recruit on Social media and referrals.
How long does it take to set up a program?
Most programs take around two weeks to set up. In some cases, we’ve set up in two days
What’s the process to set up a program?
After you’ve given us the approval to proceed, the steps are:
- An initial de-brief where we go deep into your processes so we can start developing your program.
- You send us a list of sites so we can match them to shoppers
- We develop the shopper scenarios and determine shopper training requirements
- We develop the initial questionnaire for you to review.
- Develop reporting requirements
- Finalise the questionnaire
- Your shops are loaded
- We develop the Mystery Shopper guidelines
- You’re live in field.
Do we need a contract?
There aren’t any contracts. You keep us engaged for as long as you are happy with the service. Naturally, we can provide confidentiality agreements as required.
How are the fees calculated?
There are three main components to mystery shopping programs.
- Initial once-off setup fee, usually $1,000.00 per questionnaire. The setup fee buys you all the bespoke setup, shopper recruiting requirements, shopper testing and reporting.
- A per-shop fee.
- A reimbursement of shopper expenses if required (usually around $15)
How many shops should I do?
A common question is: should I shop each store once a month, quarterly, six-monthly, or once-off?
That depends on the purpose of the data.
Annual / Once off shops are appropriate for organisations looking for system-level data (e.g. sales manager wants to know the overall level of cross-selling)
Semi-annually for organisations that want to measure the impact of major projects. For example, before and after training rollout.
Quarterly evaluations for organisations that want to undertake regional rankings. At this level, it’s also appropriate to commence store level coaching based on results.
Monthly evaluations for store-level rankings, individual store ranking, and individual employee coaching. Monthly evaluations also allow store managers the opportunity to form a frequent cadence of reporting feedback.