Customer service affects every area of our lives almost every day. It is the lady behind the till at the supermarket, the man in the café serving you the double espresso and the person you ring through to book your flights.
The standards of service you receive from these different people determine your thoughts and feelings and ultimately, your purchase decisions.
The ideal scenario
Picture the scene: you want to purchase a Home Entertainment System but require help in deciding on a model.
On entering a store you are welcomed by a staff member who listens to your needs and explains all the essential information. You leave the store, purchase in hand, confident the right choice was made based on great customer service.
In future you will return to the store and recommend it to your friends.
Compare this with a scene where, on entering the store, staff ignore you, then, when you eventually get their attention, they give you bad product advice, or simply are not attentive to your needs. You vow never to return and will certainly never recommend it to others.
The performance and attitude of frontline staff is vital to the success of a company.
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They are the public face of your company and your brand guardians, outwardly expressing the values of your company or brand.
Service is the key
While it is a well known fact that advertising campaigns can cost many millions of dollars, the beneficial and positive brand messages that are generated by a good advertising execution can be wiped out in seconds by poor customer service.
So while many companies devote significant funds to marketing and advertising, they need to consider how resources should be allocated to create the desired brand experience through the employees' interaction with the customer.
What use is it having an eye-catching branding campaigns if customers walk into one of your stores and are put off purchasing anything due to the poor level of service they receive?
Customer advice and service has become even more important to an increasingly sophisticated and demanding public who understand what good customer service means. Expectations and behaviour has shifted.
A 2007 research study undertaken by Grass Roots called Are You Being Served? UAE found that customer service is failing to impress and UAE retailers are not creating customer loyalty through their service.
In fact, 33.8% of shoppers surveyed said they would not return to the outlet they visited and 38.1% said they would not recommend the outlet to friends or family.
Furthermore, in a digital age, the internet allows self-educated experts to research products online and make potential purchase decisions before they even leave the comfort of their own home.
This presents even more challenges as customer-facing staff go head-to-head with members of the public who are now experts in their own right.
The Are You Being Served? survey found that one in three customers would not return to the outlet due to lack of intelligent service, with shoppers particularly disappointed by the lack of basic knowledge of the goods on sale, lack of initiative from sales people and a general failure to ascertain their needs. The key to ensure that staff deliver the correct levels of service to customers at the grass roots lies in mystery shopping, a fundamental tool that can be used to evaluate customer service, enabling companies to assess the levels of customer service across their stores.
Mystery shopping Perks
The benefits of a well-conceived mystery shopping campaign are numerous: an improvement in customer service; greater staff engagement; and thus higher levels of staff retention. In turn, this should increase sales figures and brand recognition. At Grass Roots we advocate that at the heart of any mystery shopping exercise should be a programme that engages the various parties - employees, channel partners and customers.
We believe that mystery shopping should be viewed as the foundation of change - inspiring people and stimulating results - rather than an exercise that just simply ticks boxes.
It should encourage staff to be inquisitive and positive towards customers and to build relationships with them - an active rather than a passive exercise.
While mystery shopping can assess whether a customer service representative greeted the customer in the correct way, or offered them the right product, there is a vast gap between just doing your job and delivering great service with real meaning and passion.
The company was originally established in 1980 in the UK and now turns over US $450 million annually and boasts offices worldwide including one in Dubai, which opened in 2006. Services on offer span the realms of digital marketing, loyalty, measurement, rewards, incentives, events and more.
Grass Roots will be teaming up with Arabian Travel News to run its mystery shopping initiative. For more information on Grass Roots and how the company can help your business, visit www.grassroots.ae
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