The impressions formed during a visit to a business dictate what customers tell others, and whether the customer will return again. In today’s competitive landscape, utilizing mystery shopping as a tool to evaluate the customer experience through the customer’s eyes can help give your business an advantage. Service Intelligence™ delivers Mystery Shopping programs that measure the performance of your business against your operating standards for product quality, guest service, cleanliness, safety, and overall brand management.

Service Intelligence utilizes anonymous shops and evaluations to collect objective assessments of an experience from the customer perspective to validate front-line employee performance against pre-established thresholds. Mystery Shopping is conducted across all customer touch points including in-person shopping, telephone shopping, and online shopping. Mystery shop data is stored in a centralized data repository and management reports provide results of the disguised shop.

Applications

• Brand or franchise representation
• Sales skills and product knowledge
• Customer service
• Safety and security procedures
• Merchandising
• Product promotion and marketing
• Transactional accuracy and efficiency
• Competitive intelligence
• Manufacturer’s suggested pricing validation

Customer Experience Measurement Methods

On-site Mystery Shops – disguised evaluations to assess customer service, merchandising, brand representation, and transactional process and efficiencies, as well as evaluating compliance with safety and security procedures, corporate and franchise standards, and industry regulations

Web Shops – evaluations of websites to assess ease of use, transactional efficiencies, and response times to online inquiries

Phone Shops – disguised evaluations conducted by phone to assess customer service and call handling processes at individual locations, call centers, or corporate offices

Wildcard Shops – additional shops completed at select sites (independent of ongoing program) that provide opportunity to improve ratings and maintain optimal site performance

Remedial Shops – repeat shop completed at sites that receive ratings that do not meet corporate threshold during regularly scheduled shop visit

Competitor Shops and Benchmark Studies – disguised evaluations of competitors in order to provide a scorecard comparison of client’s performance relative to its competition; can be customized to assess customer service, pricing, site cleanliness, and operational strengths and weaknesses

Program Consulting and Design

What sets Service Intelligence apart is our consultative approach and our strength as a business partner. Unlike the traditional mystery shopping vendor approach of data collection and presentation, we partner with you to design and implement a custom program that yields recommendations that drive business improvement.

Market Research Consultation – we analyze the following information at the onset of a program to create a snapshot of your current situation that serves as a benchmark

• Employee training and procedural materials
• Marketing materials
• Previous mystery shopping data
• Key performance indicators

Shop/Audit Design – we customize your program to meet your organizational objectives

• Realistic shopper scenarios to prevent shoppers from being recognized
• Customized audit forms to address key customer touch points
• Appropriately weighted scoring to emphasize what’s truly important to your operation
• Tailored dispatch schedule and shop frequency per location to gather complete information on all shifts and locations

Reporting Needs Analysis –by looking at what you want to get out of your program, we can determine how to set up your program

• Selection of standard reports
• Creation of custom reports
• Identification of report recipients
• Branding and formatting of reports

Shopper Recruitment and Training – each shopper selected for your program is required to complete an online exam that is custom designed to address the details of your audit with a 100% score; should there be a change in program standards or measures, shoppers are required to successfully complete a ‘refresher exam’

Best Practices Reinforcement – in order to correct operational deficiencies that are identified during shops, we provide Best Practice Reinforcement Tools that provides training recommendations to improve front line performance

• Training tips can be included in the detail shop report for each ‘no’ response on the audit form
• E-mail notifications containing training tips can be automatically sent when thresholds have not been met

Reporting

Service Intelligence delivers your mystery shopping results through our proprietary, web-based reporting system, Customer Experience Management System™ (CEMS) 3.0, which is robust, flexible, and easy to use. We create a customized website for each client and leverage our industry-leading technology to align the customer experience data we collect with the way you do business.

• Secure, password-protected website incorporating 128-bit encryption guarantees confidentiality of information.
• Web-based platform enables 24-hour, real-time access to data from anywhere Internet access is available, or through a corporate Intranet site.
• Fully customizable interface can be tailored to meet your corporate brand standards to ensure consistency of logo, fonts, images, and colors.
• Resource Center on the homepage allows posting of messages from leadership, attachment of reference documents, and communication to all users.
• User hierarchy levels enable control of access to reports and information in the system to ensure relevancy; views and access levels driven by login permissions.
• Multiple reporting levels provides a comprehensive view of every level in your organization, from a per shop instance to aggregate company-wide trending reports.
• Flexible online report access enables clients to view data in Microsoft Word, Excel, Adobe Acrobat, and many other common applications; information can be viewed in tables, charts, spreadsheets, or text formats.
• Easy data export to Excel spreadsheet format for further manipulation.

Advanced Analytics

What sets Service Intelligence apart in the mystery shopping industry is our ability to provide data correlation and recommendations to drive business results enterprise-wide. Unlike the traditional vendor approach of data collection and data dump, we recognize that too many organizations never seize the opportunity presented to them by their mystery shopping and survey programs - the opportunity to improve their organizations, whether through training, merchandising, marketing, or other changes in process or procedure. Thus, we provide measurable results by thoroughly analyzing the data, correlating it to operations, and then making recommendations to enhance the specific operational functions and positively impact top-line and bottom-line revenue.

Our ability to deliver is partly attributed to the fact that we are one of few providers to employ an in-house marketing research team. Our ability is further attributed to our Vice President of Business Solutions who guides the marketing research team and possesses 30 years of retail background. He most recently served as Director of Operations for an $85 billion, multinational, home improvement retailer that utilized mystery shopping as one vehicle to guide operational improvements. Realizing that many organizations lose much of the valuable intelligence obtained through mystery shopping because of a failure to fully understand and utilize the data they are receiving, he ensured otherwise and demonstrated marked improvements of up to 11% in key behavioral categories.

As part of its consultative approach, Service Intelligence works with each client to ensure the focus is on the areas that will most impact consumer perception and translate to the success of the business. Processes and procedures that are known to be regularly evaluated typically receive the most attention from employees; therefore, ensuring that program is properly targeted greatly contributes to the achievement of objectives.

We will help you to properly design, implement, and execute a customer feedback program that delivers:

• Consistent, real-time monitoring of the customer experience
• Identification of operational deficiencies or successes
• Actionable results to improve ‘front-line’ service delivery
• Complementary integration of all research initiatives
• Motivation for employees

Why Service Intelligence as Your Mystery Shopping Partner?

• Geographically distributed network of experienced mystery shoppers ensures timely and cost-effective shops across dispersed locations.
• Rigorous shopper screening, selection, testing and certification results in accurate, reliable data.
• Customized program design and development ensures alignment with your needs and operating procedures.
• Client-specific project guidelines and pre-established performance standards guarantee outcome meets or exceeds your expectations.
• Rigorous quality assurance process requires that each mystery shop report go through multiple automated filters and manual data quality control checks prior to being available to ensure consistent and accurate data.
• Multiple mediums of report dissemination (web, fax, e-mail or regular mail) provide flexibility and preference.
• Online, password-protected report access ensures confidentiality and 24-hour, real-time accessibility.
• Web-based tracking of assignment completion enables real-time status reviews.

There’s a proven adage that states, “what gets measured, gets done”. An effective and endorsed mystery shopping program ensures team members realize the purpose of the program and the associated benefits for themselves, for their particular store or location, and for the entire organization.

Make sure your business is top of mind with all your customers. Contact Service Intelligence today to discuss a customized program to positively impact your overall business performance.