Wagging the Dog
The Magnetic Group - Ziggy | August 18, 2010 In a recent post, Ray Sola offered a great observation about the misguided nature of many mystery shopping programs.
Ray is the founder and president of Volition.com, which is “the” mystery shopping community site. It’s completely free and offers incredible resources, especially for mystery shoppers. As such, Ray knows all the ins and outs of this business.
So his remarks carry weight.
He makes several great points, but I want to focus on an underlying theme:
- Done poorly, mystery shopping actually erodes customer service instead of enhancing it.
There are several reasons why this occurs, but two stand out as particularly ridiculous.
Frustrated with Success
It sounds impossible but it really happens: management can become frustrated with persistently high scores in certain areas, so they stop rewarding for those behaviors.
We’ve witnessed this on employee behaviors like making eye contact, smiling, and offering assistance. Typically, a minimum of coaching and sales training can get employees performing these behaviors over 90% of the time.
But as months go by, managers can get impatient and start taking these foundational behaviors for granted. So they’ll reduce the points awarded to these behaviors, or –in the worst cases– stop tracking them altogether.
Ultimately, the employees learn that these basic requirements of good service are not important to their employer, so service in these areas decreases while they focus on other areas that management deems more important, like up-selling.
(But employees who don’t smile or make good eye contact are not as successful at up-selling!)
Disconnect from Customers
Another huge pitfall that undermines good service occurs when management uses a mystery shopping program to promote behaviors that are not important to customers.
In our recent entry, I discussed a restaurant that emphasized managers visiting every table. So to score maximum points, managers would either perform quick drive-bys of the tables all night, or put a hostess in a manager’s shirt and have her do it.
But focus groups with actual customers who had experienced manager table visits revealed that customers get annoyed by fast, superficial, drive-by table visits.
If a manager visits their table and interrupts their conversation, they want it to be a meaningful interaction.
But too many times, they complained, managers interrupted their meals, asked them if everything was okay, but didn’t even stay long enough to hear their answer.
Such visits are so cursory and perfunctory that customers are actually irritated, not pleased.
If the behaviors evaluated by the shopping program had been driven (and validated) by customer feedback, this error could have been prevented.
But instead, the program was driven by management’s definition of good customer service; not their customers’ definition.
* * * * * * *
Mystery shopping can be a tremendous coaching tool that gives employees first-hand feedback from customers.
But used poorly, the tail can quickly start wagging the dog. And even if scores are improving in the areas that are important to managers, overall service satisfaction may suffer from misplaced priorities.
Reader Comments (10)
Ray Sola is an "authority" in his own mind. There are many of us who mystery shop daily who do not consider his words to carry weight. I am shocked you have not bothered to do further research on other shopping forums before making Volition into something it once was but no longer is. It is a forum that has turned off so many mystery shoppers that they have gravitated to other, far more active forums. Perhaps there is a story there. In fact, I would bet there is.
Hey there,
Thanks so much for contributing. Would love to hear your suggestions for Volition, and what other resources you find valuable.
Be well.
-Z
Ray Sola of volition.com is still the leader in Mystery shopping web sites and in helping mystery shoppers to educate themselves and support one another. The earlier post is most certainly from one of a few people who are barred from his site for unacceptable behavior.
Don't jump to any conclusions based on your assumptions. I was NOT barred from the site. I *chose* not to post. It is an unfriendly and rude site with a _leader_ who does not know the meaning of the word.
You are certainly entitled to your opinion, Cybele, but not everyone chooses to view the world like you, and we are entitled to our opinions, as well.
But if the site is so viable, why are all the players moving to other forums and posting less on Volition.
Much as the goal of mystery shopping is to offer constructive criticism, the goal of the comments section is to share ideas and not simply hurl rocks.
I'm far more interested in hearing about other examples of dubious questions on misguided mystery shopping surveys.
All the best.
-Ziggy
The only thing I recall using Volition for was just for a list of shop sites. I didn't find, for me, that much of the information of that great of value. At the same time, I didn't find it necessarily in error or harmful. Perhaps it's because I have a short attention span and was quickly bored with the chatter.
Every company has within its rights to run a business the way they see fit. Should I agree with their business philosophy, I frequent the business more often. When I disagree with something in the businesses way of handling things, I stop. This holds true for brick-and-mortar businesses and web sites. In my "day job," we place a lot of business with one particular vendor because they promised A, B. and C, based on their business philosophy. They changed the philosophy some many years later. Of course, we didn't like it, but we had a choice -- continue placing business with them, move all our business to another vendor, or leave our current business in place and start placing new business with other providers. We choose the latter.
What I do find helpful is when a mystery shopping company take value in their Shoppers, provide constructive feedback (both the positives and the negatives) on shop reports, and use appropriate Shoppers for specialized Shops and Focus Groups. Many of the Shop sites I do independent contract work for treat me like a number. How often have I not received a reply to email questions or voice mail messages, I cannot count. I have YET to have an email go unreturned from any staff person at Marketing Endeavors or The Magnetic Group. They know their shoppers. I know my family has benefited beyond any monetary value by being associated with ME and TMG.
The leadership of ME and TMG have set the bar high. From the outside looking in, I would say other providers would do well to look at ME/TMG's way of treating the shoppers and adapt this model, in some way, to their own companies.
Peace.
In many years of shopping, Volition has been a valuable tool. When I started, I used the trend of comments about companies to decide whether I would apply to shop for them. Suggestions by Ray and others on the website helped me learn the ropes. I still frequent the site and learn something almost every time. I don't personally know Ray, but I appreciate his website and insight.
Thanks for a very well written article. Any manager who uses Mystery Shopping, especially those in charge of writing the guidelines and the questions needs to read it and think about how they are shaping employee behaviors.
As for the comment above, all I can say is there are indeed some bad shoppers who cannot stay on point and interject their opinions into a form which should be factual. The comments like those above are what make companies want to switch over to IRV and give up on Mystery Shopping. Being objective and commenting on the article and sharing incite into the article is what the comments section is for.
This week during the Mystery Shopping Conference, I had lunch at a lunch chain restaurant with several company owners, schedulers and shoppers. We talked with our waiter about the restaurants move from a Mystery Shopping program to a survey on the receipt. The server was very unhappy about the change as he felt the feedback was not legit and there was a huge self selection bias in the data.
ciao,
Ray
Of course Ray would have to accuse me of being a "bad shopper" because I think Volition is a has been site and do not value Ray's opinion. I do not care. I make great money shopping and am given my pick of high end shops, often highly bonused. Those who can, DO. Those who cannot...get quoted in articles about mystery shopping. There are other forums out there where the membership is FAR more active and the threads are not as heavily edited, hence they do not contain the revisionist history that makes many Violation threads no longer make sense. If you do a quick Google search, Ziggy, you will find them without any problems.
What things do the best shopping companies do well? Treat their shoppers as equals, not numbers. Not take sides when a client and a shopper have a differing opinion of what occured during a shop - instead, they do their best to get to the bottom of it while protecting the interests and identities of both the shopper and the client. Not rejecting shops over a simple typo. Giving shoppers a fair amount of time to complete the work. Pay fairly, and pay on time - ALWAYS on time. Giving the client the correct sort of factual and actionable data without opinion.
"Any article with my name in the first sentence has to be worth reading."
As quoted by good ole Ray on his board.
That should tell you something about him and the treatment you get from his site.
It is no longer the leader, that board has scared off more people than I can count because of the very rude moderator and mean spirited people that dominate it. It may be a leader to the people who rule it but Volition is NOT the number #1 place to get information about Mystery Shopping. Ray Sola has referred to himself as God, which is disturbing. Although I am sure he deleted that bit of information off his board. It does not have any more valuable resources that you cannot find on other, friendlier forums. If the V-God is nice enough to let your comment go through and be posted, the answers you get are usually rude and snide by a handful of people that dominate the board. The people on other forums are actually polite and happy to help new people out.
Unacceptable behavior is anything Ray does not agree with. I am dead serious when I say that too, do not let his cheerleaders convince you otherwise. If he thought the moon was made out of Swiss cheese and you thought otherwise, he would make you leave The Board. If someone does not agree with him, he does not let the comment go through. Either that or he will go in and change your words around before he posts them so it reads as he wants it to.
He rips people off of their opinions in more than one way AND by forcing people to use their real name on the board he is getting people's mystery shopping accounts deactivated for doing nothing more than giving feedback people ask for.
He forces people to use their real names on the forum. Then when we want to discuss our concerns about the mystery shopping companies, we get deactivated if we say something negative.
The best mystery shopping companies allow us to air our opinions, good or bad and work with us to fix our complaints. They should also respect our privacy. They do not want us giving out their clients name to anyone. In fact we can be prosecuted. Why are they allowed to discuss their shoppers by name amongst each other without our permission.
What gives? As far as that goes, the lists he has on his site are outdated.