Is Mystery Shopping good for business?

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Assignment

Is Mystery Shopping good for business?

From: Dovile Malinauskaite

Course: Business Administration

Subject: Understanding Customers

To: Chi Elemson

23/11/2007


Content


Introduction

Nowadays the attention paid to customers is getting more and more important. Competitors may be able to suggest better service than yours, so each company must know all disadvantages in servicing customers. Estimating the quality of the service is called mystery shopping. Well-trained persons behaving as normal customers come to assess what is going well and what can be improved in the service process.

In this essay we will look at “Mystery shopping”. We have to research information about mystery shopping and to provide critical thinking, quality of thought, to bracket consumer behaviour and marketing research.


Research objectives

  • To collect information from journals, articles and books about mystery shopping.
  • Find advantages and disadvantages of mystery shopping.
  • Analyse the purpose of mystery shopping.
  • Bracket together mystery shopping with marketing research and observational research.
  • Find out how some companies perform their jobs using mystery shopping.
  • Sift feedbacks of mystery shopping.

Literature review

Request: a week in Jordan for a retired couple, including excursions and full-board accommodation

By Thomas Cook (2007)

On entering the agency, I was approached by a consultant. But when I relayed my request I was told a different department dealt with those holidays and I was asked to wait for 20 minutes or return later. I left the shop and came back 15 minutes later. However, the person I needed to see was busy, so I had to wait another 15 minutes. During the consultation 1 found the agent's sales technique to be professional and polite, although not much was covered in terms of excursions or activities without prompting. The details of the holiday were explained clearly but without much enthusiasm or interest. I was given a print-out of the details, but the ink was faded and barely legible. The package offered was suitable for my needs, though. Overall the service here was satisfactory, but could have been better if the agent had shown a bubblier, more enthusiastic manner. (65% of 100%)

Dealers Pay for Leads They Don't Get

By Cliff Banks (2007)

Is your dealership paying for Internet leads, but not getting them? It happens more than people realize, says Lisa Keller, founder of evaluation Inc., a consulting firm that mystery shops dealerships' Internet departments.

Usually lost leads happen when a shopper sends an email from the dealer's web site but the e-mail disappears into cyber space, never making it into the dealer's Internet lead-management system. Usually, it is a technical snafu.

If a dealer is spending money on search-engine optimi2ation or buying key words on the search engines and advertising to drive traffic to its web site, not getting those leads is wasted money.

"We call it lead evaporation," Keller says. In February, 11 of her dealership clients experienced some sort of technical problem in which leads disappeared.

A couple of months ago one of her dealer's web site provider's server crashed. When it came back online hours later, it restored an old e mail address that been used by the dealership's lead-management software years ago.

The result? For days, the dealership was not seeing any leads from its web site. They were being dumped into the defunct e-mail address. Leads from third-party sites were reaching the right address, so nobody noticed the missing web site leads. They still might be missing today if Keller had not been mystery shopping.

Keller mystery shops her clients - many of whom are on the Ward’s e-Dealer 100 ranking - four times a month by sending emails lead through the dealership's web site. At the end of the month, the dealer principal or general manager gets a report detailing response time and quality of the responses.

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Keller discovered the disappearing-lead problem by accident. One report she sent to a dealer last year graded the response time as a zero, meaning she received no response. After investigating, the dealership realized it was not getting any leads from its web site and quickly fixed the problem.

The real value of mystery shopping may be in determining the effectiveness of a dealership's Internet sales people, "The measurement is simple. It evaluates timeliness and quality of the response.

"Both are equally important," Keller says. The longer it takes a dealership to respond to a lead, the lower the ...

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