Do Your Customer Experience Data Streams Flow…or Trickle?

How to Align Your Customer Satisfaction and Mystery Shopping Metrics

At least twice a month, I get a slightly desperate phone call from an executive in charge of “customer experience,” hoping that LRA can clarify some of the muddy data streams that are guiding company decisions.  To paraphrase:

“Building loyalty is really important.  We work very hard to deliver an outstanding customer experience.  We have set up multiple listening posts – both customer satisfaction survey and mystery shopping programs – to help us measure our customer experience. We constantly monitor our results at the site level and see little relationship between the two metrics. Which is correct?  Send help please.”

Sound familiar? You are not alone.

Let me begin by assuring you that both mystery shopping and customer satisfaction surveys are valuable tools to help measure and shape your customer experience.  They just happen to be complementary tools designed to measure different components of the customer experience.

• Mystery shopping programs measure compliance against a defined set of standards. Presumably (but not always), the company considers these standards to be important in order to ensure a consistent experience that will reflect favorably upon the brand.  It is, in essence, measuring the customer experience from the inside-out.
• Customer satisfaction surveys can measure the level of satisfaction achieved from the customer interacting with different company touch points, whether those touch points involve people, process and/or technology.  From customer satisfaction surveys, we can identify how well different touch points resonate with customers, how they impact critical outcomes like satisfaction or loyalty, and uncover prioritized areas requiring improvement in order to maintain or enhance an outstanding customer experience.  In other words, surveys measure the customer experience from the outside-in.
  
  When executed correctly, a customer satisfaction program takes one additional step, connecting specific experiences measured in surveys to financial or behavioral outcomes.  This helps companies understand the relevance (or ROI) of focusing on a particular touch point and, ultimately, creates “wins” for both the company and its customers.  

Hopefully, you’re nodding along at this point…but are realizing that I haven’t quite addressed why both data streams can be so divergent. Let’s return to that phone call, where – much like the Book of Genesis - we start at the beginning with the following questions:  

• Were the mystery shopping and survey forms created to evaluate the same aspects of the customer experience?
  
  (Usually the answer ranges between “not really” and “the last guy did them”)

• How were the point allocations (i.e., “weights”) on the mystery shopping form created?
  
  (Usually the answer is “the same way we do everything around here – endless team meetings and an uneasy consensus!”)

• How did survey results figure into what should be measured during a “shop” or in the weighted point allocations?
  
  (Usually the answer is “they didn’t”)
  
  

And if you aren’t getting the picture yet, therein lies the dissonance.  It is very difficult for mystery shopping and survey programs to produce properly aligned results when they are built independently and the “voice of the customer” does not influence the focus of the “shop.”  This should not suggest that leveraging the survey to create the measurement items and the scoring weights will erase all confusion, but until this happens, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which the two data streams produce complementary results.

At this point of our conversation, I typically offer to work with the company to reconcile the two data streams.  Sometimes the results produce a genuine eye-popping “WOW;” in one instance the company was able to improve the connection between survey and mystery shopping data by more than 500%, allowing them to see connections that they previously thought were nonexistent.  Most organizations who go through this process find that their systems can (and do) work effectively with one another after making a handful of adjustments that require only a modest commitment of resources.

If this issue has caused you sleepless nights or just provided interesting chatter around the office water cooler,  please feel free to contact me to chat.  You can reach me directly at +1.267.495.1609 or via email at rob.kaplan-sherman@lraworldwide.com.  Just think – we can skip the whole first phone call described above!

Read Rob Kaplan-Sherman's Biography or contact Rob at rob.kaplan-sherman@lraworldwide.com.