Mystery shopping can help you understand your business and your competitors

Mystery shopping is a great way to understand how your customers are being treated by your organisation.

Mystery Shopping' or mystery visits involves regular reviewing of your service by professional or carefully selected customers who are trained to observe, experience and evaluate the customer service process of an organisation. They do this by posing as a ‘real customer’ and undertaking a series of agreed tasks, which monitor the service delivery, customer journey and the effectiveness of staff training. Each shop is followed by an evaluation, usually in the form of a questionnaire. These questionnaires are collated and reported as a dashboard report or presentation of the overall findings conclusions and issues to be addressed. 
Mystery shopping is especially useful when you want to ensure that your service standards are being upheld and whether customers are receiving a consistent level of service across your organisation. A properly planned schedule of mystery shops can really help improve your customer service – I know because I help clients do this!

However, mystery visits are also a great way to understand your competitors. Whether it be how they deal with new customers, their prices, marketing messages etc
Myster


CJM Research can help you plan, deliver and report on mystery shops working with you to improve your customer service. You can get in touch for an informal discussion about how mystery shopping can help you develop your business.

What is your brand?

A brand is simply how people think and feel about your organisation. 

Every organisation has a brand. However, not every organisation understands this. It does not matter if you manage your brand or not your customers, stakeholders and non-customers have perceptions and make judgements about you. 

Market research can help you understand how your brand is understood and perceived - whether it be to determine what your brand values are or to measure changes to these over time. This will help you understand what your brand is and actions are having the biggest (and smallest) impact on how people view your organisation. 

CJM Research (http://cjmresearch.co.uk) can help you plan, design, implement analyse and report on your brand using a broad range of tailored qualitative and quantitative methods. 

Investing in ipads is making CJM Research better

Ipads are helping improve our service to clients


At CJM Research we always look for ways to innovate and improve the service we provide our clients. One way we have done this is to re-invent the way we conduct our face-to-face interviewing by investing in ipads for our interviewers.
Advantages of ipad interviewing
Traditionally face-to-face interviewing involves six stages as shown above. This results in interviewers having to carry around piles of surveys as well as time and money spent distributing, collecting and data processing surveys.

Investing in iPads has been popular with interviewers as it is makes things easier for them. It is also better for our clients which saves time and money. Other advantages are listed below.

Get in touch at
http://www.cjmresearch.co.uk to see how we can help make your business better

Advantages of ipad interviewing 2

Who, what, where, when, who and why?





Whenever you are planning research you could take some advice from Rudyard Kipling and think of:


What is the issue, problem or decision you want to make?
Who is the research target group?
When do you need the research completed by?
How will you use the findings?
Where would you like the research carried out?
And critically why are you doing the research?

Answering these questions together with an indicative budget will help deliver the best research approach to meet your needs.

Do you really need satisfied customers?

Do you really need satisfied customers?
Customer Satisfaction is a great measure of business performance and when combined with other measures such as recommendation demographics and reasons for the levels of satisfaction it can offer a real opportunity to understand your customers and improve your business.

It is well established that organisations with the higher levels of satisfaction have higher turnover, higher customer loyalty and larger market share than other organisations.

Why would you not want your customers to be satisfied?
Simply because measuring satisfaction alone is not enough. You really want to understand what proportion of your customers are highly satisfied (or totally satisfied or very satisfied) and why this is the case and then act to improve your service.

You see there is a difference between a satisfied and a very satisfied customer. To understand this difference we need to understand what satisfaction is. The Oxford English dictionary defines satisfaction as

“Fulfilment of one’s wishes, expectations, or needs, or the pleasure derived from this”

High satisfaction is about exceeding expectations
Essentially satisfaction is about having your expectations met: I wanted a widget and I got a widget = satisfaction. The difference between satisfaction and high satisfaction is that high satisfaction is about delivering service above and beyond your customers’ expectations.

High satisfaction is about the human experience with your brand
My experience of analysing satisfaction surveys suggests that this is essentially about personal interactions that create memorable and enjoyable experiences for customers. This might be as simple as a member of staff helping a customer or the experience in the store or online being fun and enjoyable, simple or memorable.

So high satisfaction is: I wanted a widget and I got a widget + memorable positive experience = high satisfaction.

Satisfied customers are simply having their expectations met but nothing more. This is a reason is why satisfied customers leave for competitors and why aiming for these “functionally satisfied” customers is not a strong enough measure, particularly in competitive markets.

This is why measuring customer satisfaction should not be simply about overall levels of satisfaction alone. That is only half the story. For example seeing 90% satisfaction does not explain the depth of that satisfaction. For example what if all 90% are just satisfied? Or are 85% highly satisfied?

The Harvard Business Review reported this in an article called “Why satisfied customers defect”:
“Except in a few rare instances, complete customer satisfaction is the key to securing customer loyalty and generating superior long-term financial performance. Most managers realise that the more competitive the market, the more important the level of customer satisfaction. What most do not realise, however, is just how important the level of customer satisfaction is in markets where competition is intense, such as hard and soft durables, business equipment, financial services, and retailing. In markets like these, there is a tremendous difference between the loyalty of merely satisfied and completely satisfied customers” http://hbr.org/1995/11/why-satisfied-customers-defect/ar/1

Measure depth of satisfaction and then understand what are the differences between these customers and less satisfied ones
I have noticed this in my own work, I was recently in a meeting where the client stated that they had questioned whether to continue their satisfaction survey because the results were not changing. I pointed out that they were only measuring overall satisfaction not the depth of satisfaction and that it was the way the results were being reported that had to change rather than the survey approach.

A good client of mine has seen only a small change in their satisfaction with an overall satisfaction level of 97% in 2014 up 5% over the past 8 years. However over the same period the proportion of very satisfied customers has risen 15%. So whilst overall satisfaction has remained fairly steady the proportion of highly satisfied customers has increased. Understanding what makes customers more satisfied has helped them concentrate on the levels of service that matter most to improving satisfaction – this is making a difference to their customer service and also to their levels of turnover.

What you should do?
So what should you do? First you should certainly look to measure customer satisfaction. Secondly you should measure depth of satisfaction and where possible reasons for the satisfaction. Third you should then understand what are the differences between customers with different levels of satisfaction. Finally you should act on these results to improve levels of customer satisfaction and the benefits to this brings such as improved loyalty, satisfaction, turnover and market share.

CJM Research can help you do this. contact us to start improving your business.
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