Evaluating your team’s performance is one of the most difficult and time-intensive jobs facing any management team. It takes effort and money to do the work yourself, and the data can be flawed for any number of reasons.

There are several training options available, but many of them can’t give you true insight into what your team can do to improve their performance on calls to boost your sales numbers and hit your monthly goals. Pick the wrong one and you’ll end up frustrating your team and getting little in return.

That’s where mystery shopping companies can make all the difference. These training experts offer your business the most accurate feedback because their people interact with your employees as if they were customers. But how do they do it? Here are five of the most important things these companies can do for your business.

1. REAL-TIME REVIEW
Receipt, phone, and internet surveys are popular, but they are fraught with poor-quality data. Human memory is fallible, and you’re hardly getting a true picture of customer interactions because they have to send feedback long after the experience actually took place.

Mystery shopping companies measure your employees’ performance in real-time, which produces a much more faithful and authentic interpretation of interactions. And because their mystery shoppers are trained, experienced, and working according to an evaluation rubric prepared in advance, you are measuring the same variables professionally and consistently every time.

2. ENSURE ACCURATE BRAND MESSAGING AND LEGAL COMPLIANCE
The former is necessary, and the latter is non-negotiable. Mystery shopping companies evaluate not only your team’s customer service skills, but their underlying conformity with company procedures, policies, brand messaging, and the law.
The value of consistently branded messaging can’t be overstated in the current sales environment. Customers often interact with your website long before they ever call, and they are more informed than ever. If your team’s messaging doesn’t match their expectations—and deliver accurate information in critical areas like financing and service agreements—they’re going to hang up quickly.

3. CATCH EMERGING ISSUES EARLY
No matter how well-trained an employee is, the fact is, skills drift, trained concepts fade or blur in memory, and subtle variations that may not be perfectly aligned with your business are introduced by individual team members. This means that unless you measure your team’s skills on a regular basis, your current amazing customer service will start to shift out of focus. This is not a result of bad or lazy employees—it’s just human nature!

These skills are especially critical to monitor in high-stakes, high-dollar sales environments like automobile dealerships, marine dealerships, etc. With so much on the line for every major transaction, you need to catch skill drift and customer service issues at the earliest possible moment before they start costing you sales and tanking your appointment rate.

This is why a sound business strategy always invests in long-term relationships with mystery shopping companies. It costs a little money upfront, but it definitely delivers huge returns in the long run. Plus, with regular timetables for review and solid working relationships between employees and your training partner’s team, these issues can be corrected quickly and positively.

4. IMPROVE OVERALL TEAM SKILL LEVELS
Whether you’re looking at mystery shopping companies to support your business development center (BDC) or just to keep your sales and service teams on point, the benefits they’ll deliver translate to every aspect of the job. Mystery shops often reveal principles that can apply to a range of situations, and these insights can be shared with the entire team to build everyone’s skill set. And because they typically focus on a few specific instances of how language is used, your coaching partner can work in short, efficient training sessions that don’t waste valuable time.

It’s important to keep these sessions positive and use them as opportunities to celebrate success and grow skills as opposed to punitive experiences for less-than-perfect results. You should prioritize:

• Leading with the employee’s successes.
• Rewarding people materially for their good work.
• Address deficiencies in a kind and mentoring manner, stressing you believe in them and this will make them even better at their job (a powerful motivator in commission sales jobs such as automotive sales).

Remember: it may seem counterintuitive, but when you hire mystery shopping companies you are actually counting on finding failure. Doing something incorrectly is only a problem if it’s not turned into skill growth, and that’s what mystery shopping companies are all about.

5. HIGHER MORALE
By encouraging a growth mindset at your business through the positive follow-up to mystery shopping feedback, you raise more than just your customer service. It’s proven that companies that foster a growth mindset have significantly happier employees.

By working with a top mystery shopping partner, you can give your team the expert advice and supportive training they need to close more deals and develop more successful careers. That translates to more money and a better work environment they will definitely value at the end of the day.

CHOOSE YOUR PARTNER WISELY
There are a lot of different models mystery shopping companies may use, and finding a true expert can be the difference between higher revenue and sagging sales. For most businesses, the best return on your investment will come from partnering with a company that really takes the time to get to know you and your team. They should work with you to develop an evaluation rubric and mystery shop protocols and to manage the follow-up sessions and subsequent training.

At Phone Ninjas, we pride ourselves on making sure our training and mystery shopping fit your business’s needs and goals. Our mystery shopping services are a core component of our business model. We’re a training powerhouse with a track record of boosting KPIs by 300% and beyond and gladly perform follow-up reviews and training to maximize and unify your team’s skills. And we’re a great long-term partner because we work with each team member in weekly one-on-one sessions to make sure everyone is learning thoroughly and quickly. Learning never stops, so neither do we.

We’re so sure you’ll see the benefits we’ll bring to your business, we put our money where our mouth is by performing two dealership mystery shops completely free of charge. Reach out today to access these complimentary services with no further commitment, as well as schedule an in-depth demonstration of our training and mystery shopping programs.