Mystery Shopping: telephone

It is often said that you only get one chance to make a first impression. In many cases, that first impression is based on telephone contact.

Telephone mystery shopping is faster, more measurable and as a stand-alone programme can provide greater cost-effectiveness and flexibility than is possible with any other method of mystery shopping.

MarketChecker routinely creates scenarios for consumer, business, industrial and public sector enquiries. We can link these in to mystery shopping visit and postal enquiries, or compare performance against other organisations.

There are many considerations to take into account when setting up telephone mystery shop programmes. The relative merits and otherwise of each depend more than anything else on the type of business concerned and of course the objectives of the mystery shop programme itself. The main objectives normally centre around improving the level of service provided by staff with the ultimate aim of improving sales and profitability.

Recording the calls definitely clarifies how it has been evaluated. This is important from the perspectives of both identifying, and putting into practice, sales technique improvements; and also incentive issues, if applicable. As we are an independent third party, the mystery shopping can also form part of an objective assessment of the effectiveness, or otherwise, of whatever sales training may recently have taken place or be planned for the future.

We recommend recording calls because the positive feedback provided can be used to augment the sales training process and, should you opt for a scoring system, the recording can help to clarify staff queries on scores assigned.

Ask us for a quotation, or just call us for an informal chat: we think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Go to: Visit Mystery Shopping