Best Practices in Mystery Shop Program Launch: Program Administration
In a previous post we introduced the importance of proper program launch.
Best in class mystery shop programs provide a central point of internal administration. A central administrator manages the relationship with the mystery shop provider and coordinates with other stakeholders (such as training and human resources).
This central point of administration requires a strong administrator to keep the brand focused and engaged, and to make sure that recalcitrant field managers are not able to undermine the program before it begins to realize its potential value.
A best practice in launching a mystery shop program is to identify, to all stakeholders, the main contact for internal administration, and how to communicate with them. Along with identifying the internal administrator, in most cases, it is a best practice to also identify the mystery shopping provider – just to keep employees comfortable with the measurement process. However, in some cases, such as instances where there has been a history of employees gaming the system, it may be more appropriate to keep the mystery shop provider anonymous.
Disputed shops are part of the mystery shop process. Mystery shops are just a snap shot in time, and measure complicated service encounters. As a result, there may be extenuating circumstances that need to be addressed, or questions about the quality of the shopper’s performance that require both a fair and firm process to resolve.
The specifics of the dispute process should be aligned with the brand’s values and culture. Broadly, there are two ways to design a dispute process: arbitration and fixed number of challenges.
Arbitration: Most brands have a program manager or group of program managers acting as an arbitrator of disputes and ordering reshops or adjusting points to an individual shop as they see fit. The arbiter of disputes must be both fair and firm, otherwise, employees and other managers will quickly start gaming the system, bogging the process down with frivolous disputes.
Fixed Number of Challenges: Other brands give each business unit (or store) a fixed number of challenges in which they can ask for an additional shop. Managers responsible for that business unit can request a reshop for any reason. However, when the fixed number of disputes is exhausted they lose the ability to request a reshop. This approach is fair (each business unit has the same number of disputes), it reduces the administrative burden on a centralized arbiter, and reduces the potential for massive gaming of the system as there is a limited number of disputes.
Kinesis CEM 