Mystery Shopping quality - how to measure it? Why is it so important? After all, based on the results of the tests, future action plans are established - "treatment" is determined. How to evaluate the quality of a doctor? The level of who prescribes (recommends) the medicine? The article highlights, among other things, the advice for organizing mystery shopping from a document created on the basis of a thorough analysis by the EBA (European Banking Authority) of the European Union, published on July 21, 2021. You will find mature advice with recommended guidelines for organizing Mystery Shopping in Europe. Read more ...
Internal auditing – a complete solution and platform for strengthening customer service and sales communication
Internal audit, why is it necessary and useful?
Internal auditing is a great tool to develop and train your own staff yourselves. With Trendline’s internal audit solution, you can constantly remind your employees what your company expects of them when dealing with your customers. There is no limit to the number of audits you can enter. Our platform can be used at any time by your own internal staff such as trainers, auditors, mentors, product or department managers. Or, for example, enter the most important focus points of call centre call recordings with an employee to track phone call service proccess.
By entering internal audit cases on the platform and monitoring the service, both the monitor and the person being monitored learn from it. A good opportunity for colleagues to evaluate each other at a certain interval (e.g. once a month) and/or for managers to carry out service observations of their employees with a certain regularity and discuss the situation afterwards. All the data goes onto the Trendline platform, creating a thorough analysis of that particular employee, as well as of the whole department or region (etc.).
With more than 20 years of experience in training and developing sales and service companies, we can design (in partnership with you) realistic questionnaires that are tailored to your company’s sales and service process that you can start using immediately. You’ll have a clear, visual service communication template that your staff will remember and that will become increasingly natural and easier to implement.
Internal audit user levels
HQ
Sees the overall performance of the whole company and the data for all departments and employees. For example, the whole Baltic region or Estonia.
REGIONAL MANAGER
Sees the overall performance of a specific area open to them and the performance of all departments and staff in that area.
DEPARTMENT MANAGER
Sees data about their individual department. Can enter manager-employee development agreements and internal audit service reviews.
INTERNAL AUDITOR
Only sees the names of the departments and the names of the staff in those departments to which it has been authorised to enter internal audit cases. Cannot see anyone’s results or analyses, can only enter observations/audits.
Trendline internal audit interface
Trendline’s interactive and multilingual interface analyses internal audit data by company, department and employees. Each customer can define the key parameters and focus points to measure, compare and analyse.
If desired, it is possible to display the external audit (mystery shopping visits) and the internal audits on the same desktop.
Internal audit, either in combination with test purchases or separately
The internal audit module of the user interface can be used independently of external auditing(mystery shopping) service.
Multilingual user interface – what does it mean?
The users can choose the language of the Trendline platform: EST, ENG, LAT, LIT, POL, FIN… or any other agreed upon language.
An excellent solution for multinational groups operating in several countries. However, you can still use country-specific questionnaires entered in the local language, but you can analyse the internal audit results in the language of your choice.
For example, you can analyse the results of internal audit cases entered in Latvian (in LATVIA) in ESTONIAN or vice versa.
This offers an opportunity to learn from departments in other regions of the same group and see which development activities produce what results and to plan training activities accordingly.
What is the proccess to integrate this service in Your company?
A Trendline project manager will consult you and clarify your wishes and objectives. They will then open up the service to you so that you can get started immediately. You don’t need to deal with any more set-ups, departments or structures. The opening of the internal audit module will take approximately 1 week from the date of receipt of your order, depending on the number of questionnaires used, the translations and the complexity. (If you’re already using our mystery shoppinh service, it will take even less). Once the platform is open to you, you can add new staff independently.
1
We will create on our platform questionnaires that meet your service process expectations.
2
We provide users with agreed upon user rights to enter internal audits and view results.
3
We’ll open up access so you can make unlimited entries in all the departments you want.
Some examples:
Here are some examples of how an internal audit tool can be useful in different situations.
EXAMPLE 1
An in-house trainer, a service manager or a head of department observes an employee as a shadow. After the customer has left, they analyse the case together to find out what went well and what needs attention. Since the person being watched knows that they are being watched (because it was agreed), they will do their best. This creates an overview of the skills of the whole company, departments and employees. Benchmarking of strengths and weaknesses is collected.
EXAMPLE 2
A sales manager, department manager, mentor or internal trainer visits B2B customers in the company together with a salesperson on a fixed regular basis. They analyse aspects of the sales activity after the customer meeting. An overview of the actual sales style, strengths and weaknesses of the employee, the department and the company as a whole is obtained. Realistic bottlenecks are identified, behind which better performance will fall.
EXAMPLE 3
An employee can be tasked to shadow a colleague. Both know that the next customer interaction will be monitored. So the one who is being watched is doing their best, and the summary of such reports gives an idea of what the employees can do, what are their skills. Subsequent shadow observations can be used to compare whether and what is being done better.
EXAMPLE 4
During the onboarding process, a new employee is given the task of following service or sales communication in another branch of the company where they are not yet familiar with their colleagues. They will get a good picture of the problem areas and learn to avoid them immediately in their own work. At the same time, those who were observed receive useful feedback to discuss in the employee-manager feedback meeting.
EXAMPLE 5
A call centre staff member may be asked to analyse their own or a colleague’s voice recordings on the basis of an agreed upon questionnaire. This will give a good picture of the actual speaking style and will allow them to draw conclusions about themselves. It is also possible to input the speech recordings into the user interface to draw deeper conclusions about bottlenecks and to evaluate changes.
EXAMPLE 6
Employees can analyse the service and sales skills of other companies to better position themselves. The company will have a clearer picture of its own level of service compared to other companies in the same sector, and employees will learn to monitor service situations on a daily basis and draw their own conclusions about what is good and what is not.
EXAMPLE 7
A sales trainer or department manager might ask a new or senior employee to supervise themselves when they start serving the next customer. The employee can learn from a good role model, and it will be easier to give feedback and discuss implementation options afterwards, based on a real-life situation.
EXAMPLE 8
In the Internal Audit module, in addition to the service process evaluation questionnaires, we can also open other technical questionnaires for the same departments, which can be filled in by, for example, the company’s display inspectors or other staff who monitor the compliance of the outlets with the company’s guidelines. It is possible to assess places where the average customer cannot access. For example, an audit of a restaurant kitchen, or the upkeep of a warehouse, etc.
We have the experience!
We have trained, tested and created service standards for dozens of companies in different sectors.
Customers satisfied with our services include Telia, Given, Apollo Group, Toyota Baltic, Omniva, Pet City, Circle K, Ramirent, Tele2, Baltika Group, Rimi, Spice, Viru Keskus, Sportland, Swedbank, Tervis Spa Group, Hawaii Express, Ericsson Estonia, Tallink Group, Südameapteek, Postimees Group, etc.
Lets meet!
We are happy to explain the content and form of our services. We will give a demo of our services, either in your office or via a video conference, and show you the benefits that internal audit can bring to your company and how to use it.
You can conveniently include decision-makers from different regions in the video conference.
Measuring a blood pressure in itself does not improve health! If the result shows that health is out of order, then measuring again and again, even 20 times, will not change the health. This principle applies perfectly to customer service and sales communication. A lot of valuable information can be gained from Mystery Shopping or gathering customer feedback (CX), which can then be used to demonstrate either the implementation of service standards or the fulfilment of customer expectations. But, again, measuring in itself does not change the result!
Mystery Shopping service could easily cause an allergic reaction in company. Read in this article what can go wrong and how a company can avoid it. It is alaso very important to help service staff to understand the goal of this service and not to overreact.