mystery shopping coaching

After many concentrated hours of quality analysis, fieldwork, intrinsic research, and valuable insights, you receive your Mystery Shopping Report. This important data is designed to help you develop tactics and coaching tools to increase your sales and service performances.

Eventually, the report finds its way to one of the stores that have been visited by a mystery shopper. And naturally, both the store manager and sales team members are anxiously awaiting this moment.

So why the anxiety?

Employees often feel anxious because they have been working extra hard (because of negative prior reports), or simply because they have been trying to do so much better. Regardless of why the employees are excited, it all comes down to the fact that retail is in the detail!

When the report is complete, the shop manager needs to determine what the next step will be and decide how to communicate the findings to the employees. No matter how you choose to deliver the results, always remember that mystery shopping is a measurement tool and the report is a summary of how your company is doing when providing service to your customers.

Tips for Coaching Your Employees

Simply giving a report to employees and requesting that they review it can be detrimental. It makes them focus on the score rather than on the behaviors that can improve their service. Just like a coach meets with his team after reviewing the game tapes, business owners need to meet with – and motivate – their team members.

Following are some coaching tips to help you get started.

Begin with the positive.

Don’t use results just to demonstrate what the employee is doing incorrectly. By focusing completely on areas where that team member earned a low score can create feelings of discouragement or under-appreciation.

Keep it conversational.

If a doctor communicated a diagnosis to a patient but didn’t tell them what they should do about it, they’d be aggravated. The same is true for your team members. Never share results with a team member unless you have enough time to explain how they can improve.

Look for just one thing to improve.

Sometimes a team member scores negatively in more than one area. Instead of creating a laundry list of improvements they should make, put the focus on one thing that would create the greatest improvement.

Ask good questions.

The best way to challenge employees is to ask good coaching questions such as:, “How did you make improvements in this area?” or “What particular behaviors can you implement that will make customers feel more valued?”

Follow through.

When leadership notices a team member conforming to the behavior they agreed upon, they should voice their approval. On the other hand, if they notice that they are not complying, they should offer suggestions for improvement immediately. If the only opinion employees receive is from the mystery shoppers, they will focus on their evaluation instead of on providing excellent service.

Need more tips on how to communicate the results of your mystery shopping report with your team? Contact Reality Based Group today and we’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have.

 

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