Many people consider polling or customer surveys to be corrupted or useless.  There are 3 good reasons for this.  First, we understand that questions and answers can be manipulated to get the responses the organization wants to see in order to push out data in a marketing campaign.  Second, those who participate in a survey have biases: for or against something.  In customer satisfaction surveys, for example, some admit they would never give anyone a perfect score: even if the representative’s performance was flawless.  Third, others do an evaluation based on their feelings about something that happened to them that day that was unrelated to their experience as a customer.

But your customers have important information, viewpoints and ideas on what it’s like to work with your organization.  How can you gain access to these and use the results to improve your approach and train your employees?

Often the right answer is to implement a secret shopper program. And the secret behind the best ones Is using expert secret shoppers and evaluators.

What qualifies someone to be an expert?

The ability to evaluate customer conversations, assess a sales strategy or problem-solving protocols is a unique skill set.  An expert often times has listened to and evaluated thousands of conversations.  This is not A.I.- but a person who understands the nuances of conversation.

These experts can assess specific ways in which your representatives create customer experience.

• Did they use voice and wording to convey confidence or kindness? Annoyance or unhelpfulness?
• Did they leave out important assessment questions that would have changed the information or solution given to the customer?
• Did they provide accurate information?
• Do they have the skills to work with difficult people and diffuse escalating conversations?
• Did they use the organization’s protocols to care for customers with a serious issue that needs immediate attention?

Experienced evaluators analyze this critical information and provide an unbiased assessment of performance and teaching points for training and coaching purposes.

The Benefits of Using a Professional Secret Shopper

You might say, “We have an A.I. evaluation system that is a part of our phone system.”  Those systems are able to assess very basic details but are not able to assess and provide coaching points regarding your sales process, operational procedures or critical conversations.

Some organizations might say, “We can ask our own employees to secret shop.”  It’s true: inexperienced people can listen to answers to those questions and, over time, improve their skill set.  But only trained and experienced secret shoppers can pull out measurables from a conversation: items that can not only be reported but acted upon. 

Is your goal to improve customer experience?  Develop your team into experts who are better equipped to care for their customers?  Then you will need to discuss the following before you move ahead.

Two Ways to Design a Secret Shopper Program

There are two primary approaches.  First, an organization may use previously recorded conversations from their phone system.  Second, an organization can use trained secret shoppers who pose as customers.  There is value to both options.

The first method draws on your recorded calls. There are five benefits to this:

1. An expert secret shopper evaluator is able to provide additional feedback on more complex calls or calls that have multiple issues to address.
2. You can make sure every representative is assessed for training purposes.
3. You receive an unbiased assessment and results.
4. The scoring criterion is applied consistently across all customer interactions.
5. These experts can give an accurate assessment of an organization’s customer care strategy.

The second method is using a trained secret shopper.  This person dials into a location as any current or prospective customer would. This method offers most of the advantages of using recorded calls plus one more:

1. You can test every office or person on the same scenario to assess the accuracy of information and messaging

Tooty Inc. has over 30 years of experience in training and development, secret shopper (over 500,000 conversations evaluated) and customer service recognition programs.  Tooty provides accurate workforce skills assessment and common-sense solutions to managers who are responsible for carrying the torch for great customer service.