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Basing decisions on data – how mystery shopping can shape your services

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 18:59:15 GMT

Your estate agency will often need to make decisions which will affect how your business is run.

From what services you might provide, such as lettings and management, to hiring decisions. Making sure that you make the right choice can be difficult.

Using feedback data helps you to make sure that any business choices are driven by what the market wants. Mystery shopping can help you do this by identifying gaps in your service offering that may need addressing.

We explore how you can use mystery shopping feedback to help shape your services.

What is mystery shopping?

Mystery shopping is a tool that businesses use to measure the quality of their customer service.

A mystery shopper poses as a customer and assesses various aspects of your estate agency, such as the friendliness of the staff, the questions asked and the speed of service. Many estate agents use mystery shopping to ensure that their customers are receiving the best possible experience.

Mystery shopping can be an effective way to improve your customer service. By using an expert posing as a customer, you can get an accurate picture of what your customers experience when interacting with your teams.

This information can then be used to make changes that will improve the customer experience.

Mystery shopping also allows you to identify potential problems before they become major issues.

What data can you get from mystery shopping?

The key to a successful mystery shopping campaign is to have key objectives based on what you want to find out and test.

For example, you may want to explore how a potential buyer is welcomed and qualified by your sales team.

In this instance you might want to scope what questions are asked, how helpful your team are, and whether the potential buyer is responded to in a timely manner.

By scoping your objectives, you can better measure the data received.

How can you use this feedback to shape your services?

There are various ways to implement data from mystery shopping. One way is to simply compare the results of different mystery shoppers. This can give you an idea of how well your business is doing.

Another way to use data from mystery shopping is to look at specific areas that need improvement.

For example, if you find that your staff are not as friendly as you would like, you can focus on giving them customer service training or look more closely at how your culture is communicated to those in your estate agency.

Additionally, in some cases mystery shopping can identify gaps in your staffing structure that may affect how you deliver your services. For example, you may choose to employ more specialists to undertake valuations or even sales progressors if these are areas of your service that need more attention.

KnowYourMarket can help you put together a mystery shopping strategy for your business.

Training your staff to undertake valuations

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 12:40:59 GMT

Winning market appraisals is fundamental to the success of your estate agency.

However, converting valuations into instructions takes skills which are different to those required for selling property.

Therefore, it’s vital that you have members of your team who are skilled in undertaking valuations and selling your estate agency services.

With this in mind, we explore how to train your staff to undertake valuations.

Understanding vendor requirements

Not all sellers have the same motivations. While of course almost all homeowners want to get the best possible price for a property, they will often have different priorities.

It’s important that your team understand how to listen to vendors and ask the right questions prior to undertaking any on site valuation.

For example, are they simply testing the market, or do they need to move by a specific date? Are there any barriers to them choosing an agency?

By understanding what a seller is motivated by before undertaking the market appraisal, your staff will be in the best possible position to advise accordingly and win the instruction.

Know the local market

For a vendor, an agent who shows an in-depth knowledge of the local market will always be attractive. So make sure that anyone going out to undertake a market appraisal is familiar with the area in which the property is located.

While using comparables is a valuable tool, ensure that these are researched properly and that you use like for like properties which reflect the property you are visiting.

Vendors want to know that the agency they instruct knows the local market and can highlight the benefits of their property accordingly. For example if it’s in the catchment area for a popular local school, or offers parking in an area where there are few spaces.

Pitching your services

With ever increasing competition, it’s vital that anyone who undertakes market appraisals for your agency is clear on your offering and how you add value to your vendors.

This means presenting a clear strategy for marketing their property, a strong knowledge of the local market and showing your track record.

While some vendors may be price sensitive, in many cases, a vendor is more interested in your customer service offering, especially if they have had a negative experience in the past.

Therefore it is imperative that your valuers are able to clearly state how you can help them based on their specific requirements. For example, do you have history of selling quickly, are you price competitive? Knowing your value will help your valuers to shape their pitch appropriately

Understanding feedback

While you can ensure that your teams get great training, you can’t be with them on every market appraisal. Therefore understanding the reasons you don’t win an instruction are vital.

At KnowYourMarket, we can help you to properly obtain feedback when things don’t go your way.

Our customer experience dashboard enables you to look at trends in your market appraisals to properly feed back to your teams and adjust your training accordingly.

Improving brand experience with mystery shopping

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 10:10:08 GMT

Building a strong brand for your estate agency goes hand in hand with winning instructions and securing long term success.

While the term ’brand‘ may conjure up thoughts of big corporates in the industry, the reality is that for most smaller estate agencies, brand simply means reputation. And in a business which thrives on recommendations and reviews, reputation is everything.

While many estate agents may focus on building a strong brand presence in the areas they cover through local marketing strategies and being very visible online, this can be seriously let down if the customer experience is lacking. After all, you only get one chance to make a good first impression.

Why worry about brand experience?

The Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Trust in 2020, conducted May 27-June 5 in 11 countries, found that trust is the second most important factor in the decision to buy, compared to other factors such as:

- A new brand (53 percent)

- Becoming a loyal customer (49 percent)

- Price and affordability (64 percent)

As the estate agency landscape changes, fees are becoming less important as customers seek to find an agency who will look after all of their interests – from getting the best possible price for their vendors, to knowing how to manage tenants for landlords.

Brand experience and mystery shopping

First impressions really count when it comes to estate agencies.

Potential vendors are likely to request several valuations from different agencies, and with multiple listings for many properties, buyers will opt to book viewings through those who offer a great service.

Mystery shopping can be a great way to improve brand experience for your customers.

By using mystery shoppers, your company can gain valuable insights into customer service issues, areas of improvement, and potential problems. Additionally, mystery shopping can help you to train your employees on how to better serve customers and improve the overall customer experience.

How can mystery shopping work build your agency brand

You have no doubt seen online reviews for either your own agency or others which mention a bad first experience. Even if that reviewer was never a ‘real customer’.

This means getting things right at the outset will allow you to improve the perception of your estate agency in the market.

Mystery shoppers are individuals who are hired to act as customers in order to evaluate the quality of service provided by a business. Mystery shoppers will typically visit or call your agency and interact with employees in the same way that a regular customer would.

They may ask questions, or request information. After their visit, mystery shoppers will report back to the business, detailing what they liked and didn't like about their experience.

This helps you to build a better insight into how you are perceived by those who are newly introduced to your agency.

Know Your Market can help you to plan, deliver and feedback mystery shopping.

With full management reporting and a customer feedback dashboard, we help you to protect your brand.

Want to learn more? Book a demo with our team.

Truly measuring feedback and avoiding information bias

Tue, 31 May 2022 11:44:02 GMT

As an estate agency, your long-term success relies on understanding how your existing customers experience your services and how you are perceived in the wider market.

It is vital that your reputation is solid, as estate agencies rely on a new flow of vendors and landlords. You want to make sure they choose your agency over your direct competition.

We are in an era where potential customers seek out online reviews and ask for recommendations on social media. This makes it even more important that you understand what your customers think of your business, and you respond quickly to trends in feedback.

When it comes to measuring customer feedback, it is important that you avoid information bias. This can skew your results and give you a false sense of what your clients really think.

One way to avoid information bias is to use market research methods such as surveys and focus groups. This allows you to get a more accurate picture of customer opinions.

We explore how to truly measure customer feedback while also avoiding information bias.

What is information bias?

Information bias is any distortion of information that leads to a decision which is different from what would have been made if the information was accurate or properly interpreted.

This can happen when people misunderstand or misinterpret information. It can also happen when people deliberately distort information to suit their own interests.

Information bias can often occur when market research is conducted. This is because inexperienced researchers may use methods that are not well suited to the task at hand, or they may not understand how to properly interpret the data they collect.

Information bias can skew your market research results and give you a false sense of what customers really think. This in turn can lead to poor decision making when it comes to building your estate agency business.

By using appropriate market research methods and being aware of your own biases, you can avoid this problem and get accurate information about customer opinions.

Avoiding information bias in market research

Below are several ways to avoid information bias in market research:

· Use multiple methods of market research. This helps to ensure that you are getting a more accurate picture of customer opinions

· Use objective measures. This means using measures that are not influenced by opinions or bias

· Use market research techniques such as surveys and focus groups. This allows you to collect data from a diverse range of people, which helps to reduce the risk of information bias

· Be aware of your own biases. This is important when interpreting market research data. Try to look at the data objectively and be open to the possibility that your initial assumptions may be wrong

· Get help from a market research professional

When you are inexperienced in conducting market research, a professional service, such as Know Your Market can help you to not just undertake the research but choose the right methods, helping you objectively interpret the data.

This gives you assurance that your decisions are based on accurate information without any information bias

How to give mystery shopping feedback to your team

Sat, 28 May 2022 20:27:25 GMT

Mystery shopping can be a valuable tool in understanding how individuals experience your brand as a customer.

From highlighting areas where you may need to improve, to providing a way of rewarding your employees, mystery shopping allows you to get the outside view of your performance.

However, at a time where staff retention is vital, it’s important that how you feedback to your team is carefully considered.

Creating a culture where feedback from mystery shopping is valued and not feared will ensure that you create not just an excellent customer experience, but also a workplace that people enjoy.

Best forum to discuss feedback

Mystery shopping can get a bit of a bad rep amongst employees when feedback is badly handled.

But by building an open, honest, and receptive way of providing feedback you can win them over and turn it into a positive.

For top level results, creating something that gives your entire team ownership such as monthly results meetings, putting the report on to your intranet or sending via email can work well.

Where there are training needs specific to a single employee, a one-to-one approach is best and helps to avoid singling out an individual for negative feedback.

Be specific in next steps

One of the biggest benefits of mystery shopping is that it allows you to provide quick and relevant feedback for your team members. However, providing feedback alone when a customer has not perhaps been given the best experience will not answer underlying issues.

Therefore, it’s vital to have a framework that ensures you have clear next steps whether the feedback is excellent, or not quite what you would expect.

Creating a policy or general framework will allow you to ensure that you apply feedback results fairly and consistently across your teams.

Some of the next steps you may take could include:

Further customer service training
Specific product/service training
A quick catch up
Mentoring
Rewarding
Deductions
Performance management

It’s worth considering what type of score or feedback would trigger each of the actions above and having this as a written policy, so your teams know what to expect.

Consider how you reward excellent customer service

All too often the emphasis on feedback is on those who perhaps haven’t performed quite to the standard that you had hoped.

But if you focus only on negatives and overlook the positives, you can create a work environment which is stressful and leads to high staff turnover. Consider how you can use mystery shopping as part of your employee rewards initiative.

Rewards by no means need to be financial. Simply being open to celebrating a job well done can help to motivate staff.

If you’re considering using mystery shopping for your business, get in touch to discover how we can help.

Using NPS to improve your estate agency offering

Sat, 28 May 2022 20:23:28 GMT

In an era where there is more competition in estate agency than ever before – with online only offerings, freelance agents, and of course other similar companies, measuring your success can go far beyond simple monetary considerations.

Future proofing your estate agency relies on having a good reputation in the areas you serve.

Therefore, it’s vital that you understand how your vendors, buyers, tenants and landlords feel throughout the process of dealing with your teams, and don’t just find out about issues when it’s too late.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) helps you to improve your estate agency offering, effectively allowing you to judge which parts of your service may need some fine tuning, areas staff may require training and what ultimately makes your customers happy.

Why use Net Promoter Score?

Net Promoter Score is a simple survey containing one question, and a way of getting to the heart of how you customers feel about your business.

Respondents give a rating between 0 (not at all likely) and 10 (extremely likely) and, depending on their response, fall into one of 3 categories to establish an NPS score:

· Promoters respond with a score of 9 or 10 and are typically loyal customers who will help to promote your business

· Passives respond with a score of 7 or 8. They are satisfied with your service but not happy enough to be considered promoters

· Those who respond with a score of 0 to 6 are considered detractors. These are unhappy customers who are unlikely to use your services again and may even discourage others from doing so

A measure for all

As an estate agency leader, you will know that it’s the efforts of the team who contribute to the success of your business.

It’s often the case that the negotiators are the ‘stars’ as their value is so intrinsically linked to income. However, by using NPS you can start to clearly see which team members really add value to the reputation and perception of your business.

Net Promoter Score can be used across all the services that you offer, from perceptions of those who have a valuation to how a customer feels. All whilst the sale is progressing. This allows you to clearly pinpoint what parts of your estate agency offering give true value to your customers.

Consistent monitoring allows you look objectively at your process

Measuring how your customers view your business should not just take place at the end of a sale.

By using NPS at regular intervals throughout the stages of a sale or purchase, you can ensure that your offering is agile, and solve issues where a customer may start to feel unhappy and turn them from detractors to promoters.

Know Your Market offer a full NPS tracking service which allows you to have a consistent overview of how your business is performing against your most valuable KPIs – how your customers feel.

We undertake regular surveying and provide you with a dashboard, allowing you to quickly identify issues.

This allows you to have a full understanding of where you can improve your estate agency offering.

Using Mystery Shopping as part of your employee rewards initiative

Thu, 12 May 2022 08:31:03 GMT

We are all familiar with the phrase 'you only have one opportunity to make a good first impression'.

When it comes to your business this holds doubly true.

How a customer feels when they first interact with someone from your organisation will play a large part in whether they choose to work with you or a competitor.

Mystery shopping is an ideal way to ensure that you have consistency across your team’s customer interactions. You can test how individuals feel when they speak to your team on the phone, via live chat or face to face.

We explore how you can use mystery shopping as part of your employee rewards and why it’s a great idea to do so.

Retaining talent for longer

Right now, it’s most definitely an employee’s market. Roles are abundant, salaries are rising, and retention is harder.

A study undertaken in 2019 found that an average employee on £40,000 takes around £12,000 to replace. That was before the recent salary changes to the market and demands for more flexibility that have very much come into play post pandemic.

Therefore, wherever possible it is better to keep a great team member than lose them to your competitors. However, reasons for staff moving on go well beyond hard cash.

Employees now, more than ever, want to feel fulfilled in their work.

Integrating rewards into your mystery shopping results can provide both tangible money based or 'treat based' benefits. Be it an increase in commission, or something as simple as a team lunch, it empowers your teams to feel better rewarded not just for doing their job, but doing it well.

Move away from the negative

Making sure that your potential customers get a great experience is vital in safeguarding your business. But for your employees it can feel like they are under scrutiny. They may have had negative experiences with a previous employer using mystery shopping feedback in the wrong way.

Moving from mystery shopping as being primarily a benchmarking exercise and instead into a rewards-based initiative can remove these issues.

Of course, this does not remove the need to address issues found in mystery shopping audits. It does however mean that for those who perhaps need further training, the conversation starts at 'we want to help you to achieve these rewards', which is a positive rather than negative starting point.

Improve customer experience

It’s an old adage but it’s very true that happy staff make for happy customers.

By incentivising good service, your customers will get a better service.

While of course a great team will take pride in their work anyway, adding an element of reward to great mystery shopping experience will help them to consistently strive to not just meet, but exceed customer expectations.

Why estate agents lose out on valuations

Fri, 06 May 2022 15:39:08 GMT

Want to know why people request valuations and then back out of the process? Ask them!

Picture the scene – you’ve got a client with a high value property they are interested in selling. They approach you for a valuation and you put your best people on the task. Then… nothing. The period between valuation and being instructed is one in which many estate agents are losing clients. A big part of the reason might be valuations.

Valuing a property can be a complicated task. Estate agents have a vested interest in getting this right, of course. Set the price too high and you might struggle to sell the property. Set it too low and the seller might go to another estate agent who will tempt them with a better price. If you find yourself failing to convert valuations into business for your agency you need to know why.

One of the most common problems with valuations is the experience and expertise of staff. Pricing a property can be a subjective business based on an assessment about the property, the current state of the market and local amenities or transport links. More often than not it can come down to the individual judgement of the estate agent. Indeed, if buyers go to three different estate agents, they often receive three different valuations. They will then be left with a decision about which valuation they trust most.

Low valuations

In many cases people may feel a valuation is too low. When looking at the current state of the market property owners can be forgiven for getting over excited about their prospects. As a species we are naturally inclined to believe those statements which are most in tune with our interests. So, when a seller gets three different valuations they may be more inclined to go with the higher estimates.

Estate agents, therefore, can feel under pressure to come up with a valuation which reflects the optimistic expectations of the customer. However, this may backfire. A high valuation may make a property difficult to sell, especially considering that buyers will conduct their own assessments of a property’s value.

Surveyors work on a much stricter set of criteria, which means their assessment of a property’s value may differ from the estate agent. If they come back with a value which differs significantly from yours it may not only lose the sale, but it might affect the seller’s faith in your judgement.

Lack of follow up processes

Another way estate agents might be missing out is a lack of a follow up process. If you simply provide the valuation service and leave it at that the customer may end up going somewhere else. You need to think like a salesman. The valuation service is a lead – to convert it you need to follow it up perhaps with a gentle email some time after the event or even a phone call.

Whatever the reason why people decide to bail out after a valuation, it pays to know about it. Regularly surveying customers who have had a valuation is important in understanding the factors which weigh on their decisions. This can tell you where you’re going wrong and offer some pointers about how you can put things right.

Competing against your previous self

Mon, 02 May 2022 17:13:02 GMT

How to benchmark your business over time

Building a solid estate agency business means continuously improving your services.

Customer needs and wants can change rapidly, staff come and go, and the external market can affect how your business is viewed.

Therefore, it’s important that you have benchmarks and measurements in place to make sure that your agency retains a good reputation within the locations in which you are based.

Measuring metrics such as your Net Promoter Score (NPS) allows you to get an overview of how your business is viewed by those who interact with you.

We explore how you can best benchmark your business over time.

Measure consistently

One of the biggest mistakes that you can make when measuring customer experience is to not do it consistently and throughout the entire customer cycle.

For example, if you carry out only one or two surveys each year, by the time you discover the customers are not as pleased as you would like, it’s too late to change their minds. In turn this will impact on public perception. While you may get to know about a very unhappy customer via an online review or a direct complaint - it’s those who feel ambivalent that you won’t pick up on.

Additionally, as an estate agent, your interaction with a customer will often last months, if not years in the case of a landlord or tenant. Therefore, it’s vital that you measure how a customer is feeling about your business at all touchpoints throughout the process. This allows you to find out where there may be opportunities for you to improve your processes, or where staff training may be needed.

While you can choose to set benchmarks based on annual scores and feedback, by getting that feedback on a regular basis, you can quickly and efficiently make changes to improve customer satisfaction.

Understanding trends

When you measure your performance consistently you can start to identify trends within your business and work on how to manage them.

For example, throughout the stamp duty holiday sales progress was slower than usual, which, in some cases had a detrimental effect on feedback for some estate agents. While the actual problem is outside of an agency’s control – those who put in place better ways to communicate with clients had better outcomes.

By understanding factors or trends which impact on customer experience you can both plan for any potential issues, and also set realistic KPI’s for your teams.

Set goals for your teams

Some estate agents are great at setting sales goals, but often at the detriment of setting customer service ones. Left unchecked, a drop in customer experience can lead to a downturn in business – especially in a market where competing on fees is not a particularly viable long term strategy for most.

By measuring your customer feedback, you can set objectives for your teams that are founded on how a buyer, vendor, landlord or tenant views your services – not just the financial outcomes.

Provide an excellent experience across all your channels

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 17:37:28 GMT

As an estate agency, like most businesses in 2022, your customers probably converse with you across a range of channels. From calling you on the phone through a property portal, to engaging with your teams on social media, there has never been so many ways for consumers to get in touch.

The convenience of this for customers is great and often results in more leads, a win-win, but it also poses a problem for businesses.

How can you ensure that every customer experiences the same great service regardless of the contact method they choose?

We explore below…

The rise of the multi-channel customer journey

Way back when, a vendor or buyer would only have a couple of touchpoints with your agency; in person meetings at their home, at your office, or over the phone.

Therefore, ensuring a town centre branch location with a welcoming feel and employing personable staff with good phone manners would maximise your chances of landing the instruction.

Fast forward to the present day. Your customers have a multitude of ways of finding and communicating with your estate agency.

The question is, are you offering the same great service across all of them?

Measuring customer experience

One of the biggest difficulties that businesses face when it comes to measuring customer experience is they only look at existing customers or those who have completed a transaction.

This means you often don’t see the bigger picture when it comes to why a customer may have chosen to go elsewhere.

To ensure success it’s wise to measure what your brand experience feels like at every stage of the customer journey.

How to ensure consistent customer delight across a range of channels

In order to provide a better experience, you need to be aware of where there may currently be issues. And quickly.

Here at KnowYourMarket we offer a range of tools that help you to measure how your customers perceive your business at every touchpoint.

Your website will often be the first place that a potential customer experiences your brand. We offer full online user experience surveys that help to understand how your visitors use your website and where any blockages may be.

Our mystery shopping services give you the opportunity to fully evaluate your customer’s experience, and gather insights to improve your processes, and train your teams to deliver a better service.

It’s important that you measure how your customers feel throughout every stage of the service with you. While a vendor may be initially happy – for the growth of your business, it’s vital to ensure that they stay content throughout the process. Our NPS monthly tracker allows you to measure how your customers feel at every stage of working with your agency.

By having clear measures in place, you can be sure that you consistently offer an excellent service across every channel, and make improvements wherever needed.

What is Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 18:36:42 GMT

As an estate agency, making sure that every customer has a great experience and so is likely to return or recommend you to others is key to long term success.

But how can you be sure how your agency is really viewed by those who you have interacted with, in order to improve?

Net Promoter Score (NPS).

NPS is the perfect way to measure how your vendors, buyers, landlords and tenants feel about your business.

We explore NPS and why it matters so much to estate agents below...

What does your NPS score mean?

NPS is a metric used to measure customer experience. It measures the loyalty of customers and is based on their overall experience with you. NPS scores are measured using a single question within a survey;

“On a scale of zero to 10, how likely would you be to recommend our company or services?”

Anyone scoring 6 or less is considered a “detractor” – someone who wouldn’t recommend you. Those who score a seven or eight are considered “passive” while those who score a nine or ten are “promoters”.

NPS score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

As an example, if 50% of your respondents are promoters and 10% were detractors you would have an NPS score of 40.

Why does NPS matter for estate agents?

By their nature, estate agency’s don’t benefit from frequent repeat business in the same way that a retail store does.

Most vendors will only move a handful of times during their lives, so focusing on new business is often key to the success of your agency.

Because of this, reputation is everything.

Knowing that you have delighted previous customers who then become champions for your business allows you to leverage that goodwill to further the perception of your agency within your area.

It also helps you to troubleshoot issues within your agency. For example, if you have many happy buyers, but unhappy vendors, you can start to look at how to train your staff and change processes to improve the experience for your vendors.

It’s also worth considering when NPS is used within your business. By tracking average NPS through different parts of your customer journey, you can help to identify where improvements can be made.

NPS Tracking with KnowYourMarket

Our monthly NPS tracker allows you check the temperature of your customers consistently.

We email a survey link to all of your customers when they contact your business, and at key milestones of their dealings with your agency. In addition, we carry out telephone surveys with selected customers to ensure as broad a range of answers as possible and complete impartiality.

You gain access to your own insights dashboard so can consistently monitor how your customers view your agency and make changes where necessary.

How to integrate market research into your estate agency brand

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 21:06:39 GMT

Whether you run a small boutique estate agency, or are involved in marketing a national chain, how your brand is perceived by the market is more important than ever.

It’s widely known that, unfortunately, estate agents are one of the least trusted professions, so building a brand that engenders trust and reassurance to your audience allows you to establish your business in the locations you serve.

Undertaking market research allows you to “take the temperature” of the market. Be it getting more information about how your customers see your existing services, or testing a new product or rebrand.

But how can you harness research to integrate it into your estate agency brand?

Why research matters to your estate agency brand

Market research can provide the most crucial information about how your organisation is perceived and the business landscape you operate in.

Knowing how your existing customers and prospects view your business allows you to take decisions which are focused on customer need, not just what your internal teams think.

It’s not unusual to have a perception of your business “in house” which is at odds with what your existing and potential customers see.

Undertaking market research allows you to really get under the skin of what your audience truly think about you. From the colours you use in your branding, to the words you use on your website – knowing how this is seen from the outside helps you to form unbiased opinions on what you can do going forward.

How to use the results to shape your brand strategy

One of the key parts of market research is actually putting it into practice. To get valuable results that allow you to shape your brand, you need to start with the right questions from the outset.

Consider what might be subjective (do you like this logo) and what might drive better understanding of the sentiment behind the answer (how does this logo make you feel about the business).

While some questions can be asked in a straightforward scoring way (quant research) when it comes to brand, often the real “clues” are in the qual research.

Understanding customer sentiment

Another key area to forming your brand strategy is knowing what your existing customer pain points are when it comes to your business.

Measuring how your customers feel about all aspects of your service allows you to plan your marketing and brand materials.

For vendors this may mean asking questions about how they feel your estate agency performed throughout the entirety of selling their property. You could ask questions around the valuation process, how their property was marketed, or the sales progression stage.

This will allow you to then identity weak spots and find out how you can improve them.

Here at Know Your Market we can help you to not just undertake market research, but also analyse the data. This allows you to better put the results into practice and scale your agency brand.

When should you consider market research for your estate agency?

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 20:29:30 GMT

Market research is one of the most valuable tools available to estate agents. From brand research to consumer insights, good market research helps you understand your customers and your competitors. It provides valuable insights into who your customers and potential customers are, how they spend their time (and money) and why they behave in a certain way. And it builds a picture of where you sit in the marketplace, helping you to identify opportunities and grow your business.

So, when is the best time to do market research? We’ve identified three major business decisions you might face and explained why market research is beneficial in each of them.

Research If you’re rebranding

If you’re considering a rebrand, make sure you know what your customers think of your current brand identity. Does it convey the right messages? Are you seen as approachable local experts or more high-end specialists? And does this match up with how you want to be perceived?

Market research can also help you to understand the level of brand awareness, penetration and loyalty that exists within your target market. Do they know who you are? And perhaps most importantly, would they use you again or recommend you to others?

If you want to open a new office

Before deciding on a location for a new office, you need to understand more about the people and properties in that area. Market research allows you to identify competitors and get an insight into your potential customers, and what they’re looking for in an estate agency.

That way you can see how your offer might fit into the marketplace. It allows you to identify gaps you could fill and work out how you can adjust and modify your services to differentiate your brand from your competitors.

If you want to launch a new service

Launching a new lettings or more specialist service might seem like a no-brainer but before you take the leap, invest in market research to make sure the demand is really there. Not only will you be able to see exactly what people want, but you’ll also get information on how much they’re willing to pay, and what your competitors charge. This means you can position yourself in the right way from the start.

To better understand how your existing customers see you

Word of mouth is one of the best ways for an estate agency to grow their business. But if your customers are quietly unhappy then you won’t get those precious referrals.

Undertaking customer research to know how you are viewed by your vendors, landlords, tenants and buyers helps to you to know where improvement could be made.

We can help you to understand net promoter score (NPS) or undertake a full-on customer research project.

The potential gains from doing market research properly are huge. Finding out about the market you operate in and what people think of you can help you solve problems, make informed decisions and shape the direction of your whole business.

Defining goals for market research

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 08:41:57 GMT

If you’re an estate agency you may consider undertaking market research in a range of circumstances.

It may be that you are considering rebranding your agency, or that you want to test the usability of your website. You could be thinking about offering a new service or moving into a new location.

Whatever your reason for commissioning market research, the key to making sure that it is successful is clearly defining your goals and objectives from the outset.

Identify the problem or opportunity

Before thinking about questions or audiences, clearly define the problem you are looking to solve, or the opportunity you wish to take advantage of.

This could be very straightforward – “I am thinking of acquiring a second office in a specific location, is there demand for what we offer?” Or “I want to know how our existing customers perceive our service”.

Who do you need to ask?

To make sure that you get the answers you need, it’s imperative that you are asking the right people. For example, there is no point in surveying existing tenants if you really want to get a feel for what local homeowners want from an estate agency.

Looking back at the problem or opportunity – whose problem are you solving, and who offers your business the opportunity?

Create a hypothesis

When you are defining the objectives of your market research, it’s worth thinking on terms of hypothesis. What do you expect the outcome to be? You can then start to structure your questions to either prove or disprove your hypothesis (though be aware not to introduce any element of bias into your questions).

Ask the right questions

Once you are clear on what you want to prove or disprove, make sure that your questions set out to answer this in a clear way that is not too open to interpretation. At a top level you can choose to undertake qualitative or quantitative research. You may choose to use a mixture of both at different points in the research period.

Act on the research

When market research results don’t give you the answer you expected, it can be tempting to ignore them and plough ahead with the original idea anyway. Don’t do this!

If you have set clear objectives and carried out the research with the right audience, and with clear questions, you have to take on board the feedback. It may be that a few tweaks to your offer will make all the difference.

Here at KnowYourMarket, we help estate agents put together and implement a comprehensive market research plan. We can help you to define your goals and undertake the research on your behalf to drive your business decisions forward.

Beyond your customers - knowing how you are perceived in the market

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 15:21:56 GMT

As an estate agency, as with any business, understanding your market position is important.

It’s what allows you to set your objectives, know where your audience is and how best to market to them, and to make the right choices for your future growth.

For example, you may wish to be seen as the “go to” for higher end properties in your area. This may mean lower instruction levels, but higher fee commissions. In this instance your brand, advertising choices and even the wording of your brochures will likely reflect your market position.

Equally, you may want to be known as the “friendly and affordable agency”. In which case you might provide very easy to understand content and show off your local knowledge and credentials.

Knowing how you want to be perceived is core to running a successful agency.

But knowing how you are currently perceived is even more important.

Why market perception is important

When a brand gets it right, someone instantly knows what it offers and where it sits in the market.

Consider supermarkets. You know what you will get whether you choose to shop at Lidl or Waitrose. And there is certainly space for both.

But what if you think you’re perceived as the “Waitrose of agents” in your area and offering a fee structure to match, but your local market sees you more as a “Tesco”? A mismatch of brand perception, pricing and services can spell disaster for your business.

And the truth is, you’re often too close to your business to really see how you’re thought of externally.

Knowing what those who have never used your services think of you is a key step in making sure that your positioning aligns to where you want your agency brand to go.

Enticing new customers

By understanding how potential vendors, landlords and other customers may think of your brand, you can either choose to capitalise on it, or shift what you are doing to move you into a different arena.

It could be that you undertake research that finds people in your local area think your services are more expensive than they are. If that’s the case, what a great opportunity to be transparent about fees and entice new customers who perhaps thought you may be too expensive for them.

How KnowYourMarket can help you to discover how you are perceived

Here at KnowYourMarket, our experts work with you to come up with a comprehensive market research strategy and implementation plan to help you to better understand how you are viewed.

From small panel studies to large quantitative research, we allow you to get a wide range of views on your business, branding and messaging. This helps you to make better business decisions and avoid costly brand mistakes.

Ensuring Diversity in Market Research

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 11:15:33 GMT

If you’re planning on undertaking any market research, getting the audience right is one of the key elements to ensuring that you end up with truly insightful and actionable answers.

Whether you want to learn more about how your business is perceived in the market, want to rebrand or are simply looking to introduce a new product or service, getting feedback from the market before going ahead will help you to get it right.

And can also help you to avoid making the obvious mistakes which are easily done when there is no consultation with your target audience.

However – while your research may be focused on a specific demographic, how can you make sure that you are getting a diverse range of people within that core market?

We look at how you can ensure diversity in your market research.

Why does it matter?

While you usually want to make sure that the people you are surveying or speaking to meet with your ideal audience, it’s also important that you have a diverse range of views within that.

Big brands have made some pretty monumental and entirely avoidable mistakes when it comes to their campaigns or products – by being culturally incentive or non-inclusive. And while they may be able to bring in PR agencies to mop up the mess, that isn’t always the case with smaller businesses.

In an era of “cancelling” on social media, getting a truly diverse range of opinions will help you to avoid costly mistakes.

Fairly representing your client base

In some cases, it may be that you want to speak to an audience who pretty much represents what your client base looks like. For most estate agents, their clients will be based on a couple of key elements which don’t really preclude any part of the population. The areas they serve are diverse and so are their customers.

Therefore, if you are choosing to undertake research, making sure that you have a reasonable mix of respondents who represent a mixture of ages, genders, sexualities, nationalities, religions and those with disabilities are represented in the audience for your research.

A more diverse view = better insight

Whether you are testing marketing ideas or considering whether to open an estate agency office in a new location, getting a broad mix of feedback helps you to not just avoid mistakes, but also to have an edge on your competitors.

Quite often sections of society are under represented when it comes to marketing, so by understanding the needs of a more diverse range of potential customers, you are able to appeal to more of them.

Know Your Market can help you to recruit a diverse panel or seek out the ideal audience for your research. We get to the heart of what your objectives are and can recruit great quality candidates for your market research.

What makes a good focus group?

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 22:22:40 GMT

Focus groups can be a fantastic way for your business to better understand your market and make key business decisions for your estate agency.

While surveys can help you to get data at scale, the benefit of a focus group is that you can really dig deep and find out more about what really matters to your target audience. Focus groups are designed to be a friendly, collaborative discussions, where you can ask open ended questions of your audience and learn more about what they want from your business.

To get the most out of your focus group, it’s important that you have some key aspects in place. With that in mind, we look at what makes a good focus group.

Getting the right participants

Before you start to recruit participants for your focus group, spend some time mapping out who is relevant to you and the objectives of your research. Consider whether there are specific things that your audience must have done before that will make them your ideal profile – for example, do you want to ensure that you are speaking to people who have sold a home before? Or perhaps a landlord with a specific number of properties in their portfolio?

It can also be beneficial to create a list of who you would like to exclude from a group based on their demographics or behaviours. This will help you to ensure that you are working with the right group who can provide you with the feedback you need.

A comfortable space

Your participants should feel at ease throughout the entire process, so it’s important that you create a space that is comfortable physically, and an atmosphere that is welcoming.

If you’re using recording equipment, ensure that it does not feel intrusive. While your group will have to provide consent for recording, making microphones or cameras very “in your face” can make your participants feels nervous.

Wherever possible, it’s a good idea to undertake a light ice breaker exercise. This is designed to ensure that your group feel comfortable speaking in front of each other and gets the room “warmed up” prior to asking your questions.

A great moderator

Your moderator is the lynch pin of your focus group, so choose someone who can maintain control of the room, while still asking the questions that get to the heart of what you are looking to find out.

When a diverse group of people come together, it’s easy for the quieter members of the group to be overlooked, so it’s vital that the moderator is able to tease out more from those who are less “chatty” but also to ensure that more dominant characters are reigned in where necessary.

Ideally, it’s a good idea to have at least two moderators in the room – one to lead the group and someone else to take notes and ask further questions where necessary.

Whether you’re looking to hone your offering, research more about your target market, or simply want to get a better understanding of your local audience, Know Your Market can help you with informed and customer focused research.

Asking the right questions to improve market research

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 11:57:39 GMT

Undertaking market research for your business helps you to better understand your audience, launch new products or services effectively and “take the temperature” of existing customers.

However, not all research is created equal, and asking the right questions is vital if you want to get authentic results that can drive true insight.

We explore how you can ask the right questions to improve your market research.

Set your objectives

Before starting any research, objectives need to be put in place to understand the audience you are looking for responses from, the types and categories of information that you are looking to collect, and specific measurement objectives.

First and foremost, think about “what question do I need to answer”? This could be anything from “how do our existing customers perceive our brand” to “is it a good idea to launch this new service”?

Be clear – what do you need to know and who do you want to ask?

By knowing what you want to find out, you can craft your questions in a way that will meet the goals that you have set.

Asking the right audience

Choosing to ask the right people the right questions is an essential part of making sure that your market research works. If you are looking to undertake research from the general public, you need to be specific on who your ideal audience is – as it’s unlikely that any business is for everyone.

If you want to survey your existing customers, make sure that you segment them. This means splitting them up by characteristics. This could be based simply on the product or service which they have used. The more data you collect on the audience, the easier it is to identify patterns. For example, if you’re an estate agency – you may find that people are happier with your sales service than your lettings service. But you will only know this if you have properly separated landlords from vendors.

Make it easy to answer

The depth of your questions will of course depend on how you are carrying out your research. A focus group, for example, may have far more “open” questions than if you are conducting a quantitative survey with scoring.

However, it is still worth thinking about how easy the format of your question is. Avoid long questions that can confuse the person answering.

It’s also vital that you don’t confuse negative and positive questions when using a scoring system – keep it consistent.

Don’t ask leading questions

Whether written down, or asked in an interview, leading questions will not lead to accurate results.

A leading question is defined as a question asked in a way that is intended to produce a desired answer. We all have our biases and, when it comes to our businesses, even more so.

Leading questions in market research often promote a positive answer – and this can create a false sense of security that you are doing the right thing.

For example, “How will this service make your life better”. This question is already assuming a positive answer.

Whatever your purpose for research, choosing the right questions is key to obtaining fair, unbiased results that will help you to make those critical business decisions.

The benefit of authentic research - Qual vs Quant

Fri, 17 Dec 2021 09:25:59 GMT

Qualitive research, quantitative research, Big Qual, data analytics. All these terms can sound huge and rather confusing for any estate agent wanting to really get to know their customer.

But while it can sound daunting, all agencies really want to do is get the heart of their existing and potential audience to help to drive insights that allow them to truly get to know their customers and those who may be customers in the future.

The benefits of having truly authentic, unbiased insights into how your agency is perceived in your market is immeasurable. Knowing exactly what people know about you, how they see you, and what they really want from an agency allows you to make business decisions based on what the market wants, rather than what you think they may want.

So, we explore how you can get truly authentic customer research.

Qual vs Quant – what’s the difference?

Put simply quantitative research is based around numbers. It’s big data sets, statistics and based on figures. So, things like “net promoter score” or scoring a company on a scale.

Qualitative research is all about the “words”. How your brand makes people feel. Think focus groups, open ended questions and customer interviews.

Traditionally qualitative research was based on smaller data sets, thanks to the fact that humans had to interpret and analyse words and their meanings, but thanks to AI, a new type of research is emerging “Big Qual”.

This is where machine learning can help to assist humans to understand word driven data sets, but at scale.

Getting under the skin of your audience

The truth is that, as an agency, the method of research is not the big idea. It’s getting the right data that will allow you to make business and brand decisions that will get you to where you want to be.

Quantitative research has always offered the reassurance of hard figures to enable you to measure performance in several areas. In a sales driven industry, this tends to be popular. Think scoring systems and percentages. What would your customers score your service? How many people in your area have heard of you?

However, in an er a of social media, online recommendations and instant messaging, words are important. Qual research is something that allows you to drive authentic insights. What do people say and think about your business?

How Know Your Market helps you to drive authentic insights

Here at Know Your Market, we help you to drive real insight with a mixture of both qual and quant services. Our Net Promoter Score tracker is a quantitative tool which allows you to measure customer satisfaction tracked over time.

Our Brand Profiling allows you to dig deep into how your brand is positioned in the market and uses a mixture of research practices to understand how your agency sits within your landscape.

We work with you to understand exactly what you are looking to measure and achieve and provide you with access to a wide range of research techniques . From online surveys to focus groups.

The highs and lows of Estate Agency customer experience (CX)

Tue, 21 Sep 2021 00:00:00 GMT

How good is the Customer Experience in your Estate Agency?

“We’re a small team. I know all my staff do a good job”

“I know how to sell houses”

“We’ve got great ratings on TrustPilot”

“I do the valuations myself”

“We give our staff comprehensive training”

Any of these lines sound familiar to you? To be fair to you guys (all estate agents out there), you’re right, you are all hard-working, polite and knowledgeable professionals.

However, in these still uncertain, hyper-competitive times, gaining an edge through premium Customer Experience (CX) and maximising the sales opportunities that do come along, is crucial.

Mystery Shopping is an effective way to see your company through your customers’ eyes, and ensure you have pro-active interactions with your customers every time.

The key things for property customers are:

Responsiveness
Ability and knowledge to answer their queries quickly
Feeling special i.e. taking an interest in their specific needs and circumstances, going the extra mile to help them find the home they want

From the agent’s point of view, you want to get that sale: whether that’s signing up a new landlord, renting out a property, winning a valuation or booking in a promising viewing.

Contrast what the customers’ expectations are (see list above) with what happens in real life during the majority of interactions we’ve monitored over the last 12 months…

Transcript of an actual recorded mystery shop call:

“Good morning, ABC Estates, Jo speaking. How can I help you?”

“Oh, good morning Jo, I wonder whether you can help me? I’ve seen a lovely 3-bed property on your website. It’s on Acacia Avenue. I’ve just got a couple of questions.”

“Ok, of course. Just let me pull the details up. What is it you would like to know?”

“I can’t see from the pictures how big the garden is and whether there’s any off-street parking?”

“Oh yes, I’ve been to see that property. It’s a good size garden, mainly lawn with a small decking area next to the house. Parking-wise, there’s allocated street parking but no garage or driveway currently. Potentially the front garden could be converted to a parking space?”

“That’s very helpful, thank you. I think that’s all I needed to know.”

“OK, great. Can I help you with anything else?”

“Mmm, no, I think that’s everything for now.”

“Ok, thanks for calling. Ring me back if you have any other questions. Bye”

I’m sure you don’t need me to point out the highs and lows of this conversation? But let's take a look:

GOOD

Personalised company greeting
Ability to answer query quickly and knowledgeably
Polite and courteous throughout

BAD

Didn’t take any personal details
Didn’t offer to book in a viewing
Didn’t find out what they were looking for
Didn’t find out whether they had a property to sell/rent out
Didn’t find out about timescales, financial situation, etc. etc.

This was a genuine mystery shop call, conducted by Know Your Market in the last 6 months, and alarmingly typifies the weakest examples of customer interaction in Estate Agency. As a sector, based on our recent experience:

85% of estate agents answer the phone politely with a personalised, on brand greeting
81% of estate agents can answer the initial enquiry from the customer
40% took any form of personal details
32% asked any kind of information-gathering questions regarding needs/situation

Mystery Shopping can help you join up the dots between customer expectations (responsiveness, ability to answer queries, making them feel special) and the sales objectives of your company.

An ongoing programme of measurement enables staff to internalise the ideal communication flow, including those trickier cross-selling and sales opportunities, until executing the perfect interaction becomes second nature.

Showing an interest in each and every customer drastically improves customer experience AND optimises your sales opportunities. Win, win!

There's a simple adage in business: you can't improve what you don't measure.

So if you'd like to benchmark your Customer Experience , and chart an immediate course towards rapid improvement, let us know. We'd be happy to help, starting with a chat about your current challenges and what you'd like to improve most.

Why use the NPS Monthly Tracker?

Thu, 12 Aug 2021 20:26:03 GMT

To successfully grow your business, it is essential to gain a deep understanding of your customers, and their motivations for buying your products and services.

A lot of businesses talk about having a good NPS or wanting to improve their NPS. But what exactly is it; why should you care about it; and how do you go about measuring and improving it?

HOW DO YOU MEASURE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION?

NPS, which stands for Net Promoter Score, is a simple customer satisfaction (CSAT) metric, or more specifically, a customer loyalty metric. It gives a business an overall read on how satisfied their customers are by asking them how likely they would be to recommend the business to others.

Customers are asked one straightforward question to calculate the NPS:

“On a scale of zero to 10, how likely would you be to recommend our company or services?”

The percentage of customers giving a score of 0-6 (detractors – people who will not recommend your business to others and who might in fact recommend against using your business) is then subtracted from the percentage of customers giving a score of 9-10 (promoters – people who are very likely to recommend your business to others). Passives, those giving a score of 7-8 are not part of the calculation.

WHAT IS A GOOD CSAT SCORE?

A tricky question, but one frequently asked. Let’s start by looking at how an NPS scale works. It is a tough metric to score well on. The calculation is heavily weighted towards detractors giving them the whole range of points from 0-6. Passives are defined as a 7 or an 8, where in most other areas of life a score of 70% or 80% is considered pretty good. To even begin to get a positive NPS you need customers to give you a 9 or 10. And we know that some customers will just never give those scores even when they are actually very happy with your service or product. The way the metric is calculated is quite polarising.

In general, an NPS below 0 would be an indicator that your business has significant problems to address. Any NPS over zero can be seen as winning and 0-30 is a very respectable space to occupy. Scores of 30+ are considered a good customer satisfaction score and your business has far more satisfied customers than dissatisfied ones. If you are achieving scores of 70+ then your business is really acing its customer service, your customers love you and you are enjoying a high level of onward personal recommendations.

Another huge variable affecting what is considered a good NPS, is which industry or sector your business fits into. Some sectors such as hospitality, department stores and travel/leisure tend to achieve a higher NPS because customers like interacting with these companies and there are more opportunities to receive good customer service or enjoy innovative experiences. Typically, more essential, everyday sectors such as financial services, utility companies, internet providers often have a lower NPS.

There are numerous other factors affecting the average NPS between sectors, such as size of company (bigger companies attract more complaints and may collect data from a broader geographic area); level of competition and innovation and how that affects customer service perceptions; differing customer expectations; and whether a company is a start-up or an established player in its field.

SO WHY MEASURE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION?

Good question. It is difficult to obtain much insight from looking at your absolute NPS, lumped in with all sectors and industries that collate such a measure. However, it is a useful metric when looking at your own business’s customer satisfaction performance over time, and across different touchpoints; or if you want to benchmark your performance within your own industry, or your niche within that industry.

Understanding how your business is performing at an overall level within its competitive set is vital to maintaining or increasing market share, remaining relevant to your customers and achieving business growth and longevity.

Tracking the average NPS of your own business over time provides a handy barometer of customer satisfaction and loyalty. It can be used to motivate and reward staff and is a simple metric which can be shared with internal stakeholders or feed into board level KPIs.

Asking the NPS question at different moments during your customer’s journey with your business can also be revealing. For example, if you run a furniture retail company and asked your customers for their ‘likelihood to recommend’ score as they exit the store, they might on average give you a 9 out of 10. Let’s assume they enjoyed browsing the store, were helped by a friendly and knowledgeable member of staff, had a delicious coffee and cake in the café, and found the product they wanted to order. Let’s then imagine it is six weeks later, they have had no communication from the furniture company, and they still don’t know when their sofa is going to be delivered. Or perhaps the agreed delivery took place but the delivery men were rude and damaged a wall whilst putting the sofa into position. You can see that the customer satisfaction scores collected at those different moments might vary wildly.

It is therefore important to think about how you collate, group and analyse the scores you collect from your customers. Putting all scores into one pot still has value as it increases the sample size (and therefore the validity/robustness of the data) and is still a measure of overall satisfaction with your business and its customer touchpoints. It may not, however, tell you anything specific about which part of the customer journey is negatively impacting the NPS or how to fix it.

AND HOW DO YOU IMPROVE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION?

I would question whether improving your NPS is a sensible objective, when used in isolation. Instead, what a business should focus on is improving its customer service and consistently delivering a quality customer experience. If you do that then the NPS will go up.

To achieve that, the NPS question is often combined with a follow-up open-ended question along the lines of

“Please can you tell me why you gave that score?”
This seemingly innocuous question is where the magic happens.

The insights and context gathered at this point in the survey show you what you need to improve or change, and which changes to prioritise. The comments given by the Passives (those scoring 7 or 8) can be particularly enlightening as that group of customers are the least likely to give you spontaneous feedback via platforms such as Feefo or TrustPilot. Their experience was just a bit “meh”. Open-ended feedback collected within an NPS or a broader Customer Satisfaction survey, and then acted upon, will help turn “meh” into “amazing”.

The insights gathered can be coded and themed to shine a light on frequently occurring issues or pain points as well as providing granular detail for those businesses who want to follow up individual pieces of feedback.

Net Promoter®, NPS® and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

How to choose the best Mystery Shopping companies in the UK

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Mystery shopping is an highly valuable tool used by thousands of the best B2C & B2B businesses across the UK. And all those businesses have one thing in common. They understand that by investing in understanding and delivering an exceptional customer experience, they will be closer to achieving their business goals.

Mystery shops are best conducted by expert, third-party UK Mystery Shopping companies. The best mystery shopper companies work with their client business to understand what they are looking to learn, about their customer experience and sales process, and will provide an end to end service to help you achieve that research goal. From development of a mystery shop scenario, through finding a suitable mystery shopper and guiding them through the mystery shop process, to analysis of the data, and reporting of the final results.

However, with a variety of mystery shopping companies in the UK, how do you choose the best mystery shopping company for your business research needs?

Below we highlight 5 key criteria to look out for when choosing your mystery shop company.

1. Quality of service

It sounds obvious of course, but in the case of choosing the best mystery shopper companies, quality of service is more important than anything. Not all providers will offer the same level of quality as the other.

Consider that your chosen mystery shopping company will be sending shoppers to engage with your members of staff to test the service they deliver, and your sales process. It is vitally important they are finding the right shopper, and delivering the right scenario, to minimise the amount of time your staff spend dealing with mystery shop enquiries, but maximising the efficiency of delivering you the insight you require.

Scrutinise your prospective providers for their quality assurance processes:

How do they design sector specific, appropriate scenarios, to test your particular sales process?
How they choose the right shopper to best fit the brief?
And how do they ensure validity of results?

Be sure to ask all of these questions, and if you'd like to benchmark responses, I can help you with that.

2. Experience matters

The best mystery shopping company fit will vary from business to business, as some of this will be down to sector experience.

When looking at choosing your preferred supplier check if they have experience in delivering mystery shopping at a similar scale required for your business in the same sector that you operate.

The best mystery shopping company for your business will be able to take the lead with realistic scenarios for your sector, and the right shopper database that meets your geographic and demographic requirements. This will minimise the time your business needs to invest in managing the programme.

Beyond sector experience, look for more broad mystery shopping experience. Are they a member of the MSPA (Mystery Shopping Professional Association)? If not, it is probably worth asking why and checking if they have any other credentials with industry suppliers or case studies to support their credibility as one of the best mystery shopper companies in the UK.

3. Dedicated account management

As with choosing most of your business suppliers, the personal relationship is important too. Finding the right contact(s) that you ‘click with' makes working together much easier.

Find a mystery shopping company that will provide you with a dedicated account manager. A great account manager will ensure a consistently high level of mystery shopping service that meets your business needs with minimal input from you.

4. Flexible programmes

The best mystery shopping programmes, that help a business continually deliver exceptional customer experience and optimal sales process, are deployed on a regular (monthly or quarterly) basis.

However, that does not necessarily mean that is right for your business. Certainly, if you are starting with your first mystery shopping programme, you may want to trial first. Also, dependent on what you are looking to mystery shop, an ad-hoc or one-off mystery shop programme may be suitable in some cases.

Whatever your requirement, the best mystery shopping companies in the UK should be flexible to meet your business needs.

5. Actionable insight & TANGIBLE business impact

After all, this is what mystery shopping exists for!

Delivering actionable insight into your business, that can help you drive positive business change; be that by driving individual employee performance improvements, or by informing process change.

The right UK mystery shopping company for your business will have a proven capability of not only delivering insight into your business, but also delivering the information in a way that highlights key areas for improvement, and ultimately helps drive business change.

Make sure you check with the mystery shopping company that they deliver the results in the format you desire; audio, video, written report, summary reports, management level insight etc., should all be delivered as standard by any of the best mystery shopping companies.

Know Your Market are not only passionate about Customer Experience, and how Mystery Shopping can help shape the experience your business offers. We're also obsessed with delivering all of the above quality measures, for every client we work with.

If you would like to explore your mystery shopping requirement, do not hesitate to get in touch. We would be happy to chat anytime. info@knowyourmarket.net

How to improve customer experience in retail

Tue, 29 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Customer Experience is becoming an ever-increasingly important aspect of business success for bricks and mortar, online, and brick and click retailers alike. For the high street, the experience now needs to be safe yet innovative; for online brands, the experience should be user friendly and efficient.

MYSTERY SHOPPING CAN HELP

So how can you go about measuring and improving the experience you offer to customers? Mystery shopping is a great place to start and uses people just like your real customers to test out your customer service and sales processes in a methodical and objective fashion.

Multi-channel Assessment

A good mystery shopping provider can assess every aspect of your customer experience, across all channels of communication, online and offline, including engaging with Live Chat on a website, social media enquiries, making a phone or email enquiry, interacting with staff in store and face to face, or virtual in-home sales consultations.

Multi-touch Monitoring

Mystery shopping is multi-channel but it is also multi-touch. One effective mystery shop design, for example, could be to browse a retail website, place an order and then return the item after delivery.

The retail mystery shopping questionnaire would collate feedback on the whole journey:

the user experience of the website (search function, broken links, payment process etc.)
the delivery and packaging experience (delivery time and accuracy of items received, packaging quality/amount, politeness of delivery driver etc.)
and then the whole returns process (ease of use of the return form/location drop, refund processing efficiency, replacement items etc.).

This method of monitoring the customer experience is complementary to other tactical customer satisfaction research you might be conducting and looks at the joined-up customer journey (as opposed to a single interaction point) and can provide both qualitative and quantitative data.

You can quickly see where there might be negative moments along the customer journey that impact the customer experience and your brand equity. These in-the-moment frustrations can be hard to pick up through traditional customer satisfaction surveys alone.

Video as a Training Tool

In a physical store, mystery shopping really comes into its own, particularly if you opt to carry out covert video mystery shops. Audio-visual files provide irrefutable evidence of the in-store experience and can be used effectively in staff training programmes and incentive schemes. There is nothing like seeing and hearing your interaction with a customer to drive home what you do naturally well, and what you might need more training on.

Video mystery shops can also be used to demonstrate best practice and are extremely effective at breaking down sales processes into their constituent parts to create a more easily absorbed learning resource.

The retail mystery shopping questionnaire is structured to mirror training processes and the different stages of the sales process and engagement with a customer. By doing this it forms a cohesive part of a retailer’s training materials and helps to reinforce the steps and requirements for staff through repetition and practical, real life scenarios.

Eyes Everywhere

Physical mystery shopping is also a cost-effective tool in monitoring the safety and ambience of a store. Covid-compliant signage and hygiene measures, staff appearance, store cleanliness, queue control and additional facilities such as car parking and cafes can all be included in the assessment.

No manager can be in all places at all times. Conducting a high volume and high frequency mystery shopping programme enables effective monitoring of many factors affecting a customer’s store experience and ensures brand values are demonstrated consistently and well.

Dynamic Reporting

A good mystery shopping provider shows adds value through the reporting and insights they can offer. Data that can be filtered by area, type of store, individual touchpoint, question or channel, regional manager, or other custom properties, makes it easy to see where effort should be focused to enhance that all important customer experience, and in turn drives brand loyalty, brand advocacy, and repeat custom.

If you are interested in improving your retail customer experience, please get in touch by emailing info@knowyourmarket.net or schedule a chat here .

Customer Journey Mapping: A key to unlocking success

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Customer Journey Mapping – What is it and why do it?

I am frequently asked to explain what Customer Journey Mapping is and what its purpose is. Always happy to help, here it is.

At its simplest level a Customer Journey Map is a visual or diagrammatic representation of all the interactions and experiences a customer has with a brand or business, whether that’s a phone call, an online enquiry, a physical store visit, instant messaging or social media. Customer journey mapping is the process of creating that visual map.

Customer journey mapping helps businesses step into their customer’s shoes and see their business from the customer's perspective. It helps businesses gain insights into common customer pain points, how they can improve the customer experience, and define what customers, and prospective customers, need in order to use their services or make a purchase.

From a customer’s perspective, they want their experience with a company to be connected and seamless. They expect companies to know and remember, across multiple touch-points, who they are and what they are looking for, so that the necessary information is available and without the necessity to repeat or clarify their needs. A map helps reveal any disconnects or blockages in your business.

Going through the process of customer journey mapping is beneficial at any time but can be a particularly useful business tool during a period of significant change. And let’s face it, the times are a changing.

What are the benefits?

Helping you see where and how customers interact with your business
Focusing the business on particular customer needs at different stages in the process
Providing an objective overview of your sales process
Illustrating any gaps between the desired customer experience and the one actually received
Highlighting development priorities and bringing those to life with your team
Allowing you to concentrate efforts and expenditure on what matters most to maximise effectiveness

Customer journey mapping can be conducted in isolation as a standalone piece of research or form part of a larger consultation process, Voice of the Customer programme or workflow analysis. It can refer to an internal-facing process whereby an external Customer Experience expert helps key stakeholders and frontline staff identify all components of their workflows and customer touch-points, or it may also include outward-facing activity where a company’s customers are brought into the conversation.

Where possible, it is usually beneficial to combine both types. If you do not, you run the risk of placing the wrong emphasis on particular moments or processes, or worse, forgetting about some of the interactions that take place completely. Staff are too close to the business to see it as your customers do.

So how do you actually go about the process?

Well, there are many different techniques available to you but using an external third-party specialist is a good place to start! A good CX consultant would go through some or all of these steps, depending on the nature of the project:

Extended consultation to collect as much relevant information as possible about the business and define the project scope
Moderate a series of in-depth guided discussions with key stakeholders from your organisation. These interactive sessions mine the knowledge of the team to define the current customer touchpoints, pathways and expectations
Talk to customers and establish customer expectations and satisfaction vs. current delivery of all aspects of the products/services of the business
Conduct a full ICT review and staff training audit if relevant
Produce a comprehensive report including map visualisation, gap analysis and recommended action plan
Provide follow-up consultation expertise to aid implementation of action plan and facilitate any additional technologies required.

Here at Know Your Market we pride ourselves on our listening skills and ability to really get under the skin of every business we work with so we can provide holistic, joined-up advice and solutions.

Get in touch today for more information by emailing info@knowyourmarket.net or schedule a chat here .

Knowledge is power - 5 benefits of market research

Sun, 27 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Market Research is such a broad subject, that people are often afraid to get into it, because they don't know where to start, or what they should be researching first.

Whereas in reality, those questions are actually the beginning of the process itself, and done well, will pay fabulous dividends.

I have written a couple of interesting market research proposals this week, and it got me thinking about how conducting any kind of market research is beneficial to a company or organisation if it is clearly driven by the business goals.

Writing a proposal is one of the favourite parts of my job. Because it's all about taking everything I have discussed with the client, the entire information dump, sometimes over several calls and emails, and encapsulating that into a small number of precise business objectives, and a resulting list of research objectives that help meet those goals. I then take those research objectives and work out the best methodology(ies) to find the answers needed.

So let me offer just 5 benefits of Market Research that sprang to mind whilst I was writing this week, and I'll try and explain how companies can use Market Research to improve and grow.

It’s Good to Talk

Firstly, just going through the process of having a research consultation with me (free of charge by the way) is like a therapy session for your business. It helps formulate and explore in detail any obstacles, inefficiencies, recurring problems or challenges that disturb your peace of mind. Articulating and unpicking the issues with an objective expert genuinely aids clear thinking and takes you several steps closer to resolution.

Breaking down each aspect into its constituent parts means everyone is clear about what we need to achieve through the research project(s) and it makes the results more useable for the teams or individuals tasked with implementing the findings. The challenges they are tackling are already broken down into bite-sized action points.

Evidenced Decision-making

Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the key advantage gained in conducting market research is that you have tangible evidence on which to base your business decisions and strategy. Robust sample sizes from online surveys provide quantitative data on almost anything, from which logo people prefer to what bundle of features is the most appealing; in depth qualitative feedback from customers gives you the confidence to greenlight more development work or to diversify offerings you have long been considering.

Often, business leaders have been working within their industry for a long period of time. With that longevity comes experience, but it can also bring short-sightedness or foster misconceptions. Market research allows you to look afresh, through the eyes of your customers, at what you do and how you do it.

Whether the results reinforce what you already know or challenge you to think differently, that is surely a valuable piece of intel.

Stakeholder Buy-In

A corollary to point 2 is the way market research can help achieve stakeholder buy-in within an organisation, whether that is your fellow directors, your employees or even your customers. It provides thoughtfully presented evidence or opinion, gathered through a professional and objective third party, to help persuade other members of an organisation that it might be a valid decision to test out some fresh ideas, or allocate budget to a particular initiative or market opportunity.

Customers also like being talked to and asked for their opinions, provided they are confident their voices will be heard. A well-designed research project should achieve healthy completion rates, encouraging customers to describe in detail their experiences with your business and make suggestions for improvement or innovation. If you make a point of explaining to them why you are doing the research and then feedback to them with some “You said, we listened” style communications then the circle is complete.

Ongoing Roadmap

Where a good researcher takes the time to establish the client’s business objectives and designs the research to meet those objectives, then the resulting report and outputs become a valuable road map now, and for the future. A good research report is written in appropriate language and within the relevant context to fit the audience(s) at the client organisation. It should provide stakeholders with actionable insights and recommendations that enable practical next steps to be taken.

As time goes by, and personnel may change, the report should remain a self-contained asset that accurately reflected the needs of the business at that time and becomes an essential reference resource. Any future research should be conducted with an eye to what you have already learned.

Unexpected Bonus

Finally, during research something often gets mentioned or discussed that is not the focus of the research project; and that right there is your unexpected bonus. You find something out from your customers or prospects that you hadn’t even thought to ask them about or didn’t even know was a thing. Those insight gems can be game changers, leading to brand new product/service innovation, or more minor adjustments to products or processes that enhance the customer experience.

To find out more about how Mystery Research can directly lead to growing your business, please contact me, Gina Fumagalli , Head of Insight Services at Know Your Market.

What is brand profiling, and how could it benefit you?

Sat, 26 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Your brand is one of the most powerful tools within your entire business, yet often it goes unplanned. You don't entirely own your brand, it's shared with your customers or fans. Because your brand is the sum of how you are perceived, and what your customers think, may not marry precisely with what you intend.

Brand Profiling is a useful technique to understand what customers and prospective customers think about your business and more specifically what they think about your brand.

Rather than talking just to your existing customers, with brand profiling we collect the views of your potential customers. For bricks and mortar companies, this would be in the local areas you serve; for fully online businesses it might be a much wider target audience, probably the whole of the UK.

Instead of focusing on metrics such as how satisfied your customers are with your service, this kind of research is more strategic in nature. So, it can be used to answer questions such as:

Are you positioning your brand and services to match your target market’s needs and expectations?
How does my business fit within the competitive marketplace?
How well known am I compared to other businesses like mine?
Do people know all the services/products we offer?
What do people think of my logo?
What brand characteristics do people associate with my business?

It’s an incredibly flexible and versatile research method, typically collected via an online survey targeted at the kind of people you want to talk to. That might simply be all adults living close to your business or it could be much more tightly targeted by criteria such as life stage, profession or socio-economic grouping.

At Know Your Market we have a few ways to go about collecting this kind of data for you. In BC times (before Covid) a traditional but effective method was to talk to people in the town where your business is based and run through the survey face to face.

These days we’re much more likely to use social media like Facebook and Instagram alongside our mystery shoppers database to target the area and demographic you want to talk to and then collect responses via an online survey link.

We manage the whole process for you: from survey design and programming through to managing the social media activity and collecting and analysing the data. Depending on what you need, we can provide simple tabulations for each question or create a bespoke report drawing out the findings for you and making recommendations.

I can’t over-estimate the value of this kind of research. Without checking how you are perceived in terms of brand positioning and how your business fits within the competitive landscape, you are effectively marketing your business with a blindfold on.

If you would like to talk about how brand profiling can help your business, please get in touch.

What is the purpose of mystery shopping?

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

People often wonder where the true value lies in Mystery Shopping. And the answer lies in the blend of insight it offers between asking real customers what they think, and asking customer experience experts how well you are performing.

SEE THE WORLD THROUGH YOUR CUSTOMERS' EYES

Mystery shopping, or secret shopping, as it is sometimes called has multiple benefits for businesses and organisations. But its first purpose is to enable management teams to see their business through the eyes of their customers. This is essential for managers, because the longer someone works with a business, and often the more senior they become, the harder it is to remember what it is like to be an authentic customer, experiencing their product or services as a user rather than a provider.

Seniority in a business, and the subsequent extra responsibilities that entails, can also make it difficult to keep in touch with frontline staff and: a) keep an eye on how they are interacting with customers and; b) see any pain points or recurring issues that could be resolved through a process tweak or a targeted training session.

MYSTERY SHOPPING AS A TRAINING TOOL

Using mystery shopping results and insights for staff training and motivation is another key purpose of the exercise. Not only do managers forget what it is like to be a customer, so too can frontline staff, or any other staff in a business.

Mystery shopping provides very detailed feedback reports, which can be used directly as a training tool with individual staff members, feeding into training programmes or being used as a demonstration of best practice.

Businesses who understand the purpose of mystery shopping as a motivational tool commonly link the results of their mystery shopping programme with staff rewards and incentive schemes. This has the dual consequence of improving performance by incentivising staff to score well, and nurturing a positive, supportive learning environment.

Better performance leads to more effective sales process delivery and superior customer experiences, which leads to enhanced business growth.

Mystery shopping outputs are commonly in multi-media format such as written transcripts, audio files from telephone interactions, audio-visual screen grabs and recordings for virtual interactions, and even video footage of face-to-face interactions.

This wealth of evidence and research materials make it an irrefutable record of what took place and creates a powerful and versatile resource for managers. People learn in different ways and a variety of media enables individual staff members to choose the way that works best for them, brings the learnings to life, and drives more effective assimilation of sales processes and customer service delivery.

CUSTOMER JOURNEY & PROCESS TESTING

Mystery shopping is very versatile and allows a business to set up custom-built scenarios and 'what if' situations to monitor different sales processes, legal and financial compliance (if applicable) and customer experience.

Managers can build a bespoke mystery shopping programme to suit their precise business objectives. For example, a large furniture retailer might want to look specifically at how corner sofas are being sold to customers and whether extras upselling is being done consistently and well. A mystery shopper can be given a very precise brief to trigger particular work flows and test staff knowledge. For a removals company, scenarios might include moving abroad, short timescales, delicate or valuable items being moved etc.

The options are endless and give managers the opportunity to test their frequent (or less frequent) customer journeys in a safe, controlled way, looking at all aspects of the process. In today’s online world this might include follow-up sales activity monitoring, correct and complete delivery of email/text communications, seamless digital form filling, refund/returns processes and more.

CONCLUSION

Mystery shoppers interact with a business just as authentic customers do (they are real people after all).

So the fundamental purpose of Mystery Shopping is to allow managers to see their business with new eyes (without the inevitable bias of the insider); provide relevant feedback and training for staff; and check that processes and customer experience are being delivered as they should be – seamlessly and consistently.

Here at Know Your Market we pride ourselves on our listening skills and ability to really get under the skin of every business we work with so we can provide holistic, joined-up advice and solutions.

Get in touch today for more information by emailing info@knowyourmarket.net

Become a mystery shopper and get paid to shop!

Thu, 24 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

A lot of people love shopping! So what if you could get paid to shop? Sounds like the perfect job, right?

Well, working as a secret shopper means you can do exactly that, but it's much more than just shopping. It's a skilled process that delivers actionable insight for a business to improve upon.

There are lots of benefits to being a mystery shopper for Know Your Market and the flexible assignments can be fitted in and around your other commitments. We use shoppers who live locally to our clients to complete the mystery shopping jobs, so not only are you being paid, but you are also helping your local businesses improve the service and experience they offer to customers.

What is mystery shopping?

Mystery Shopping is a technique companies use to check how well they are delivering good customer service to their customers. Shoppers pose as real customers and interact with the company or shop in the same way a regular person would.

This might be on the phone, via email or visiting a store in person. The shopper then reports back to us on how it all went by filling in a questionnaire. The scores from the questionnaires and the shopper’s comments help the company improve their customer service and put right any less than perfect customer experience.

It is a very valuable tool because the feedback is genuine and scored against the same set of criteria each time. This way the company can monitor their staff in a methodical way and help support them with additional training or materials.

What sort of assignments can a shopper get?

We have a range of clients from a variety of sectors, including high street retail, estate agents, furniture shops, self-storage facilities and many more. Each client is different and has a bespoke mystery shopping programme, so no two assignments will ever be the same.

You might be asked to browse for a particular type of furniture such as a wooden dining table and chairs; you might be asked to phone an estate agent and ask some questions about a property you have seen online; or try on an item of clothing in a shop’s changing rooms and see how clean and tidy everything is kept.

One of our most popular services is video mystery shopping. These are assignments where you take a covert video that records your interaction with the member of staff. Although it sounds very 007, it is easier than it sounds and we provide you with all the equipment you need and detailed instructions on how to use it.

Our hidden cameras are tiny and fit inside a shirt or blouse button, handbag lining or even a takeaway coffee cup that we send to you. You will soon forget you are wearing it and find yourself acting as you normally would.

Clients also make sure that their staff are aware and have given consent to be mystery shopped in this way. They just don’t know when it will take place.

When we are assigning a visit, we like to speak to our shoppers over the phone, as well as emailing through detailed briefs. We love to have a chat before the assignment starts so we can answer any questions you may have and offer advice. Our friendly and knowledgeable team is always available to deal with queries and provide relevant guidance and support, where needed.

But don’t take our word for it. Here’s what a couple of our shoppers have to say about working for Know Your Market Mystery Shopping.

‘I've enjoyed working for Know Your Market. I have to say what I love about this company is the transparency on what you need to do to achieve the task. The instructions are clear and concise and most importantly the payment is fast and accurate. Best of all it’s always a pleasure to speak to the office staff as they are all upbeat and friendly.’ Anna, Hertfordshire

‘I always enjoy working for Know Your Market. Their briefs are clear, concise, and easy to understand. The assignments are interesting, and there is always a friendly, helpful staff member a phone call away, if I have any questions. Last but not least, payments are swift and correct.’ Rebecca, Kent

If you like what you hear and want to give it a go, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. You can sign up here .

How to be a good mystery-shopper

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Mystery Shopping works! But how?

Whether you want to know how Mystery Shopping delivers results for a business, or you fancy doing a bit of mystery shopping yourself, knowing what makes a good shopper is fundamental.

As a Mystery Shopper your findings are the foundation of what we do, so it is essential that your work is carried out to the highest standard. So what's required to be a good Mystery Shopper?

1. Honesty

First and foremost, shoppers must be honest and unbiased. Your feedback should provide the client with a clear, accurate and complete picture of your customer experience. As well as answering specific questions, you may also be asked for your own personal viewpoint. Your comments should always be objective and a fair reflection of your experience.

2. Act Natural

You should only take on projects that you are comfortable with as it is important that you enact your scenario in a natural, convincing manner. Do not give a running commentary on what is happening or comment on the appearance or performance of the store or staff in relation to the mystery shop as you may be overheard.

3. Ability to Follow a Brief

I cannot stress how important this is! Each mystery shopping project will come with a specific project brief, designed by the client. This will give you an understanding of what the client is looking to measure during your visit and prevent you prompting staff to do things they are being measured on. If a brief isn’t followed correctly it may mean the Mystery Shop is invalid, and the client business won’t get the valuable and realistic feedback they rely on to monitor their business.

4. Writing and PC Skills

Although you don’t need an English degree or to be an IT genius, you do need to have basic English writing and computing skills. It is very important that shoppers write clear and concise reports, including specifics of the project. Make sure you re-read your work, looking out for spelling and grammatical errors before submitting. Think about how the client will be reading the report, set the scene and write a story for them! Writing information-rich and factual reports will increase your chances of taking on more mystery shopping projects.

5. Good Memory

Obviously, you can’t walk around the stores with a pen and paper in hand, so a good memory is key! It is helpful to print off a copy of the brief and questionnaire to complete by hand straight after your visit, while the details are still fresh in your memory. This should obviously be done out of sight of the location and staff and transferred onto the online system when you return home.

6. Reliability

Be realistic when accepting a project and do not commit to anything if it puts you under too much pressure to complete it in the agreed timescale. Do what you have agreed to do - unreliable mystery shoppers can jeopardise a whole project. If you do have a problem, communicate immediately so a solution can be found. Questionnaires must be submitted the morning after your visit so results can be processed as soon as possible, and a client reassured that their programme is active.

7. Remain a Mystery

The identity of a Mystery Shopper must always remain a mystery and should never be revealed during a visit! All projects that you undertake are strictly confidential and you must not disclose any information relating to your projects to third parties.

So, there we have it – easy right? And it's these exacting standards that ensure that the best customer focused businesses gather regular insight on their customer's experience, and take regular improvement action to do better every day.

If you'd like to know more, our friendly and experienced Insight Team are on hand to answer any questions you may have every step of the way. You can reach us on 0 1403 230650 or info@knowyourmarket.net

Or if you'd like to become a mystery shopper, please visit our website to sign up. https://www.knowyourmarket.net/mystery-shoppers-jobs

Can you really know your customer?

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Know Your Customer!

An easy thing to say, but what does it mean, and how do you go about it?

What does it mean?

In a nutshell, it means knowing who your customers are and what drives them to make a purchase, be that a sofa, a car or professional services. Customer motivations can be split broadly into two categories: functional drivers and experiential drivers.

Functional drivers might include price, suitability for purpose, convenience, ease of use and reliability; experiential drivers might include choice, customer service, control and empathy.

How do you go about it?

The single most effective tool at your disposal to get closer to your customers is primary market research. Research in all its forms drives insights, and evidence-based insights make the difference between thinking you know your customer and really knowing your customer.

What Your Customer Sees

You work for your company; if you’re the business owner you likely work, eat, sleep and live your company. Believe me when I say: “You are too closely involved to see what your customers see”. I call it internal blindness. Mystery shopping gives you the perfect customer’s eye-view of your product or services. Mystery shopping is carried out by real people, people who either already are your customer or could well be in the future. You can’t get much closer than that.

Newsflash! Customers are not a homogenous group: different customers require different approaches and, in many cases, different services or products too. Committing to an ongoing mystery shopping programme allows you and your staff to get close to diverse customers and customer behaviours. You can use those learnings to add nuance to your sales strategies and differentiate your approach whilst maintaining or improving universal elements of customer experience.

Reward Good Performance

Regular mystery shopping allows you to monitor, improve and reward staff performance on a continuous basis which in turn delivers continuous improvement in customer experience. Clever companies tend to have very transparent training and reward programmes. Mystery shopping becomes a key component of their staff training and employees welcome the chance to both show off what they do well and learn what they can do better. As a tool for consistent and high-quality customer service, mystery shopping is hard to beat.

Mixed Methodology – Robust Results

Well-designed mystery shopping programmes deliver robust quantitative and qualitative data – the holy grail of market insights. You get the “what happened” story (data driven, quantitative data) and the “why it happened” story (granular, qualitative commentaries). Add to that some “so what?” reporting to weave the numbers and the anecdotal together and you’re suddenly in a powerful position to see what’s going well and where you might need to improve or adapt.

The same is true for other primary research methodologies which have the customer centre stage; Carefully thought-out exit questionnaires, focus groups with different customer profiles; there are numerous ways to open the dialogue and find out what your customers are thinking and why. The beauty of market research is that it’s conducted by a third party, a research expert highly skilled at drawing out insights that your sales team doing a follow-up call simply cannot. The market researcher is an impartial sounding board who can build up trust and follow avenues of discussion that a simple closed-question survey is unlikely to reach.

That insight data and analysis has multiple applications in your business; let’s take it back to the functional and experiential motivations that drive consumers. Functionally, you can investigate price sensitivity, assess the relative importance of different product/service features, measure reliability and convenience. On the experiential side you have a window on how your company makes your customers feel; how much choice and control they experience when using your product/service and, perhaps most importantly, would they recommend you to friends and family?

At Know Your Market, we pride ourselves on offering a tailored approach to our clients’ business and research objectives. Our clients use us as it suits them, and that’s how it should be. We will give you our expert opinion on how best to structure your research and what metrics you should include, but beyond that the world is your oyster. The questionnaires are individually created for each client allowing you to cover whatever specific details about the sales process or CX you wish to cover. Our mystery shoppers are a picky bunch and they’ll make sure your business is not cutting any corners or fobbing your customers off with sub-optimal customer service.

Know Your Market Insight Services offers a comprehensive suite of market research solutions. Whether you want to know who your customers are, what they think of your customer service or whether an innovative idea is a viable product launch, we can help.

5 Key points for success in Market Research

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

5 Things to Consider When Buying Primary Market Research

Market research is a very broad church, with as many definitions as there are cat hairs on my kitchen floor just now. However, a good general description for me is - market research helps answer questions about your business and/or its customers so you can make more informed decisions and reduce risk.

The vastness of the market research universe and its many variables can be off-putting to the average layperson. I don’t intend to cover it off in one blog post (that would be truly crazy) but here at least are a few pointers for the things you should be considering when thinking about commissioning a piece of primary market research, whether that’s through your in-house insight team or via an external agency.

1. What question(s) are you trying to answer?

This may seem obvious, but you would be amazed how rarely people come to a kick-off meeting or initial call without having thought much about this. Sometimes they just have an idea that they ought to be doing market research, sometimes they have so many unknowns in their business that they can’t see the wood for the trees.

Either way, the clearer and more specific you can be about the questions you are trying to answer, the more likely it is that you will design realistic research objectives and obtain practical, valid insights of genuine use for your business.

Don’t worry if you need help formulating your business objectives and hence the research objectives, that’s part of an agency’s expertise, but do come to the discussion prepared to open up and talk.

2. Who do you need to talk to?

Depending what sort of research you’re doing, this could be anyone from your employees to your customers to your competitors even. You may not know the right audience. Part of the research objectives (questions you want answering) might be identifying target consumer or business groups. It is important to think about this carefully at the start of the process though as it affects everything including approach, cost, timescales, size of sample.

For example, for employee research, you might want to consider talking to ALL your employees if it’s a small company. For a larger organisation, a cross-section of different levels of seniority and job function might be sufficient. For a clothes retailer you might want to talk to a mix of in-store and online only customers.

Making sure the sample is representative of the target universe is essential to deliver robust data if you intend to use it for market sizing or sales modelling. If you are doing exploratory research where you are still formulating ideas for new products or gathering background information on a new topic then a smaller sample, talked to in greater depth, might be more appropriate.

3. How will the business use the findings?

This is as important as defining what questions you need to answer. Even if you do use an external agency, you must also resource the project sufficiently in-house. If possible, appoint a research champion (even if this is just a temporary extra hat for a marketing manager) so a single contact point can coordinate the whole process and make sure you maximise the value from the reporting outputs.

Quite rightly, in many organisations, there are likely to be several stakeholders from different departments invested in a research project. It is worth taking some time during the initial research briefing phase to think about what sort of data and information will suit each of these audiences. This can then be reflected in the make-up of the research design and most importantly in the reporting and data outputs.

The product developer needs concrete, precise feedback on features and design; a sales director may want to know price tolerance thresholds; a marketing manager the key hooks for describing a new product or service to customers, and so on.

Sometimes, thinking about this carefully leads to a research project being split into several phases or even separate pieces of work. A common error is to try and find out EVERYTHING on one survey. Not only will this bore the pants off your respondents, it will inevitably muddy the water when it comes to clear insights in the reporting.

4. When do you need the results?

You are probably thinking this is one of those annoying questions the agency always asks. The answer of course being “Yesterday!” in almost all instances. And yes, of course we need to know your timescales to plan our own resource and schedules. However, please do ask yourselves this question internally.

Make sure you think about the questions you have early enough in the process whether that’s a planned new flavour of yogurt in your product range or a new feature for a mobile phone. Too many times have I delivered research reports and debriefs, only to be told that a product launch has already gone ahead based on someone’s hunch. At best, you have wasted everyone’s time and money in conducting the research; at worst, you make the wrong decision and cost your business thousands of pounds and potentially brand reputation as well.

Timing also affects the type of research it is feasible to conduct. If you need a quick read on what customers think of your new billboards (due at the printer’s next week), an online A/B survey or similar is probably sufficient; you won’t have time to conduct focus groups that explore the subtle artistic nuances of colour and font before your print deadline.

5. What’s your budget?

I know, I know, another annoying question agencies tend to ask, but with good reason. Even if you don’t tell the agency what your real budget is, think about it inside your head and with your teams.

It genuinely affects the type of research you can do both in terms of scope and timeframe. Generally, the larger the sample the more expensive for quantitative research (where you ask a lot of people some very structured questions). Length of survey or interview/focus group and type of audience are also key factors. For example, talking to business peers or any B2B target is generally more expensive than finding your average consumer amongst the general population.

Even having an opinion on whether it’s a big wide-ranging project or a small discrete project is helpful. Share that information at the initial discussion so more viable options are presented back to you. Again, don’t panic if you really don’t know how much you should be spending, a good agency will offer different level solutions to suit and provide advice free of charge.

For any research project, big or small, please contact the Insights Team at Know Your Market for a friendly chat and free advice. We are excellent listeners.

What is Market Research and why is it important?

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Although there is no one-size fits all definition, Market Research can reasonably be defined as the activity of gathering and analysing information (data) to answer questions about your business or organisation and its products or services. This process, and the insight from it allows you to get closer to your customers and make more informed decisions.

What is the purpose of market research?

Market research can be used to answer very specific business questions and objectives. It can also be more exploratory, helping you understand the micro or macro environment in which your business operates. Basically, market research is a useful tool whatever the unknowns in a business.

Market research can be used to answer a variety of questions or problems. Some examples might include:

How satisfied are customers with our customer service?
What are the most important service aspects for our clients?
What do customers think about our website?
How do we compare with the competition?
Will customers like our new product idea?
Why are so many staff members leaving?

Why is market research important?

Market research is important because making important business decisions without supporting data can be a risky strategy. Good quality market research provides data-driven, robust insight to support business strategy and inform choices. If there is disagreement amongst stakeholders on the best direction to take within an organisation, market research can be a practical and fair approach to achieve consensus and move forwards.

What are the benefits of market research?

There are many benefits to be had from conducting any type of market research. One key benefit is to optimise your customer experience by seeing your product or service afresh through your customers’ eyes. Listening to what your customers have to say and responding to those insights with actions and improvements grows loyalty and brand advocacy.

The same is true of employee research. Understanding what motivates the people around you and taking the time to hear their thoughts and ideas on the business is a fantastic source of insight to drive innovation and streamline processes. Plus it builds employee loyalty and increases discretional effort.

Common market research methods

Three common methods used to conduct market research are surveys, interviews or focus groups, and observational research (or ethnography as researchers often like to call it). Of course there are myriad other variations and options but let’s focus on these three for now.

1. Surveys

Surveys are great when you need to get feedback from a decent sample of your customers or potential customers. If you want to answer questions that start with Who? What? When? How many? then this could be a good type of approach.

Best suited to closed questions with a defined choice of possible answers. Keep it as concise as possible to avoid respondent fatigue. If you don’t know the profile of your typical customer, this can be a good opportunity to capture basic information on age, gender, life stage and so on. But don’t collect needless data. It’s unethical and will stop you focusing on the real questions you’re trying to answer.

2. Interviews/Focus Groups

Less representative of your whole customer base potentially, these data collection methods are great if your questions are more exploratory and open-ended in nature such as Why? How? You can select respondents based on specific criteria and really get to know them in depth and understand the emotions and motivations behind their actions and choices. It’s recommended to get a trained moderator to conduct this type of research to avoid internal bias and to be an objective sounding board.

3. Observational Research (Ethnography)

A bit like a fly-on-the-wall documentary, this technique allows you to watch your customers interact with your website/app or product in a realistic environment without the constraints or direction of pre-defined questions or a moderator. This is a very powerful technique as you see first-hand any blockers or confusion the customer experiences whilst accessing your services. It often produces insights and answers to questions you didn’t even know you had!

It can be used equally effectively to assess complete customer journeys and decision-making processes or very specific tasks or purchases. Great used in combination with other methods to provide structure around the observations.

Getting close to the action - Know Your Market

Sun, 20 Jun 2021 20:28:30 GMT

I’ve had a bad week. Well, Tuesday morning was bad. By lunchtime on Tuesday things were looking a bit rosier, and by Wednesday I was back to my default “glass (at least) half-full” state of mind. Let me explain. Being quite new in my role here at Know Your Market and wanting to get closer to our operational processes, I volunteered to do a video mystery shop for one of our clients. Reader, I messed it up… Without going into too much detail, it basically failed to record (turned itself off in my pocket) and all the rich insights I’d gathered and worked hard to engineer into the visit were wasted.

As I sat outside, swearing in my car, I realised that I’d actually gained more from this experience than I’d lost. OK, so my team back at HQ were going to have to re-assign the job and I looked a bit of an idiot, but crucially, I now knew what it really felt like to be one of our mystery shoppers. I knew how important it is to practise with the equipment and research your scenario; I understood the churning stomach feeling as you get into character; I knew how important it is to have a supportive office team behind you; and I knew how important a well-designed questionnaire is. First-hand experience of the tasks you are asking your staff to perform is invaluable and leads to effective and empathetic management, which in turn leads to motivated and high-performing staff.

Mystery shopping is a practical short-cut to this. Maybe you’re a Director whose selling days are a distant memory; maybe you’re a senior manager from a non-sales background; maybe you’re a Sales Director with little customer service experience; mystery shopping gives you that in-the-moment feedback on every step of your sales and customer service processes. Detailed reports and audio-visual footage mean you can observe, first-hand and unfiltered, the challenges your sales teams face and how they deliver your company ethos and hopefully top-notch customer service to boot.

The first time you use mystery shopping you might find your scores are less than perfect. So what? That’s the whole point. Using the detailed feedback from a variety of scenarios and a variety of shoppers you can pinpoint the areas you need to work on and celebrate the things you and your team are already doing well. Repeat visits over time help to build a robust picture of service and track improvements. Reinforcing your company culture via mystery shopping demonstrates commitment to your staff and your customers.

Remember, thinking you know what it’s like to be on the sales frontline, or even further removed, what it’s like to be a customer, is a country mile away from the reality of actually knowing what that feels like and recalling accurately the emotive and practical aspects of the journey. Watching the customer react to your staff member; listening to what the customer really wants can be a game changer. A well-designed questionnaire helps to capture those nuances through the open comments sections and video footage is the ultimate tool in drilling down into the details of what happened and why. Insights gained can be applied at a macro and micro level within an organisation driving sales opportunities and high-quality customer relationships.

Mystery shopping analysis can also trigger innovation. It could be as simple as realising your staff can’t access stock information easily whilst on the shop floor talking to a customer. Solution: light, hand-held smart device rather than a heavy laptop in one area of the store. Or, maybe some members of your sales team aren’t confident enough to upsell extra products or services, or they don’t instinctively spot those opportunities. Unless you witness the interaction “live” you might miss out on beneficial tweaks and changes you could be making to your training and sales processes.

Knowledge is power: Shop yourself, but also consider shopping your key competitors. Not only do you find out how they do things (and you might just pick up some tips and tricks), you can explore where you sit as a brand within a customer’s frame of reference and how they think about you compared with the competitors when they’re making their purchase decisions.

If you’re wondering how I re-filled my virtual glass of optimism, the answer is I had a meeting with an inspiring client, someone who really ‘gets’ insight and the value of mystery shopping. Oh, plus finding out I’m not the only one who fluffed their first video mystery shop in the team ��.

Top 5 customer service errors in property

Sun, 20 Jun 2021 20:23:00 GMT

Help your team to avoid these common mistakes, to win more business

Working for a leading supplier of mystery shopping to the property sector, I spend a lot of time reading and proofing mystery shopper reports from Estate Agents all round the UK.

I am constantly amazed at how frequently the same mistakes are made. Here is my round-up of 5 of the most common.

1. Jumping in too soon

Agents can jump in too soon, asking customers when they want to view a property or want a valuation done, rather than first getting to the bottom of the customer's enquiry. Often the customer is not in a position to arrange a viewing and may just want a question answered about a property of interest, or a service you’re offering. Engage with your customers, build a rapport, and provide the answer and service THEY require.

2. Registering customer details

Agents often fail to take a customer’s details properly, instead leaving the onus on the customer to get back in contact with them. In a recent project we saw only 14% of agents took the customer’s contact details and current postal address. In everyday situations, think how many lost leads that could be? Be proactive, take their contact details and agree next steps with them. Seems simple right? So why aren't agents doing it? From our research we have found that this significantly improves the customer’s experience as they feel genuinely valued.

3. Introducing other properties

During mystery shops we see agents letting phone calls come to an end, purely the specific property a customer is enquiring about is not available. Yet this is a perfect time to discover what your customer is looking for in their next property. Question them, understand their needs, show an interest, and introduce other properties that you have on your books. If you don’t have any properties that match their requirements, at least you have details on file in case something else comes up.

4. Discovering the customer’s situation

Frequently agents completely forget to ask customers what their current position is, or enquire whether they have a property to sell. Doing this can turn a buyer enquiry into a vendor enquiry. It seems basic, but it can take an enquiry much further than simply answering the few questions they have. It may also enable you to recommend a mortgage advisor, or at least establish whether they can pass the affordability check.

5. Conversational questions

Don’t get me wrong, I think questioning customers is the most important thing here. But equally ensuring your questioning is authentic, rather than overly scripted is imperative. Getting as much information from your customers as possible is great for matching them with properties and understanding what they want from a property. However, rather than reeling off a list of questions you feel you need to ask, try to include them in natural conversation. Whilst building a rapport with a customer you can find out so much more about them. Customers may feel your questioning is intrusive and scripted if you simply go through a tick list and be less likely to engage with your or your agency. Property customer journeys are highly emotive experiences.

So, there we have it. Eradicate these common pitfalls and you're on the road to standing out from the estate agency crowd.

But this is just the beginning. Start here, and help your team continuously improve, and they will quickly provide superior service that really delights customers and wins you more business.

Be proactive and really listen to people so you can deliver a better customer experience for everyone. If you'd like to know how, just get in touch and we can tell you more.

Virtual customer experiences - How to get them right

Sun, 20 Jun 2021 20:21:25 GMT

When customer experiences change rapidly, to meet enforced circumstances, there's often no measurement and no way of benchmarking success. We've recently worked with property clients who moved quickly to mystery shop their new virtual services.

Lockdown has been tough on many businesses, across a variety of sectors, and unfortunately many will not come out of the other side. However, it has not all been negative.

We have continued to mystery shop throughout and have seen many businesses using their initiative and adapting the way they work to ensure they are still successful in this new norm. Many companies are using a variety of virtual services to ensure they can offer like for like customer service compared with that available pre-Covid.

As we enter a further period of uncertainty with case numbers on the rise again, it is becoming increasingly important to ensure that any virtual services you do offer satisfy the customer’s needs and are delivered to the same high standards.

One industry where virtual services are on the rise is the property industry. Despite branches now being open, lots of people still prefer to do as much as possible from the comfort of their own homes rather than heading out into busy shopping areas or other people’s homes. We have seen many estate agencies conducting property valuations and viewings virtually, rather than face to face, whether that is the initial property tour with the vendor/landlord or subsequent viewings and online video tours for the portals.

We recently completed a project of over two hundred home valuation mystery shops for a big client and some of their competitors. We kept the scenario true to life by allowing shoppers to choose the competitor agents they wanted to come and value their home. This resulted in a hybrid mix of virtual and physical appraisals taking place.

Interestingly, not all agents choosing to deliver their services virtually are getting it quite right yet. On this project, our analysis showed that viewings conducted in person had an average customer experience score of 81%, compared with only 45% when done virtually. This is a huge gap and really showed that the virtual viewings could and needed to be improved. Our mystery shop reports were able to pinpoint exactly how the two methods compared at each step of the process and provide guidance for our client on how to do things better in each.

One big difference between the two was the questioning from the agent. Questioning a potential customer seems so simple, but based on our research, customers felt surprised at the lack of questioning during the virtual viewings. They seemed rushed and agents found it more difficult to develop their usual natural rapport with a client. Understanding your customer’s situation and needs is so important so that the experience can be tailored to their requirements. The learning here is to take your time in the same way as you would if you were in a customer’s home physically, relax into the technology, show empathy and demonstrate pro-active behaviours.

Another note on the technology front. A common issue we observed amongst agents was that they did not check that customers knew how to use the piece of software they were using or planned to use during an interaction. Despite the increased popularity of Zoom, Skype et al during lockdown, many customers are still not familiar or entirely comfortable with these platforms and need a little more support and guidance.

First-hand during a mystery shop we saw an instance where the shopper had never used Zoom before and the call handler was unable to explain appropriately how to use it. In the end our shopper had to call back another time – not great customer service and another lost lead for the list!

Not everyone is tech-savvy and some customers will become frustrated if the service is not explained well or is difficult to use. Others will not approach you at all so you need to make any virtual services as accessible as possible. Make sure your staff are trained and practised so they know the ins and outs of the software and can transfer this knowledge effectively onto your customers.

More positively, one of our clients who has always been very engaged in their programme and continued mystery shopping throughout the pandemic, has actually seen an increase in their customer experience scores during lockdown. During the height of the crisis, when companies were faced with minimising contact, they switched from conducting physical visits, to virtual visits over Zoom. This enabled them to show their customers around their facility, and offer all the same solutions as previously, whilst keeping customers and staff safe and secure. Their physical visits customer experience score was 84.3% before lockdown but increased to 92.2% when changing to virtual viewings.

When done right, there is no reason why the customers cannot have just as good, if not a better experience virtually. With no clear end to coronavirus in sight, it is vital that the virtual services you offer still meet, if not exceed, customer expectations.

How to win if you're selling financial services or mortgages

Sun, 20 Jun 2021 20:19:17 GMT

Trust is a Must in Financial Services CX

Financial Services may seem like a dry, matter of fact, transactional industry; in reality, the opposite is true. Yes, there is a lot of financial data and complex product information involved, which must be communicated and explained to customers, but the most important aspect of their customer experience is “Do I trust this person?”

And whilst mortgage applications might be red hot this week, you can't take sales success for granted. Here's some key advice on how to make sure you've got a winning customer experience:

It’s a Journey, not a Transaction

The process of buying a mortgage, life insurance or pension product is an emotional customer journey. Each touchpoint or transaction along the process is individually important but it’s essential for a successful financial services organisation that you consider the whole process and map that journey in its entirety. Only by taking a holistic view can you really empathise with the customer and their changing needs and emotions. If a customer feels that you understand their dreams and aspirations (even sub-consciously) you become their trusted partner, not just for this transaction, but potentially for life. Trust improves the stickiness of your products and fosters multiple product buy-in.

Take Time to Put Customers at Ease

The practical steps involved in applying for a mortgage or other financial product necessitate asking intrusive questions of the customer. People are often uncomfortable with talking about money. They fear judgement over what they choose to spend their money on and what store card or credit card debt they might have. Enabling the customer to feel comfortable and at ease when discussing these details is essential to building trust.

Flexible Fit and Personalisation

Nowadays, with a changing employment landscape (Coronavirus uncertainty, gig economy, zero hours contracts, portfolio careers), customers require support and guidance more than ever to help them select a product that works for them and for which they will be able to make a successful application. Buying a financial product is no longer just about getting the numbers right and a one-size fits all product. Customers want tailored, customised solutions that work for them. Taking time to get to know and understand customers’ lifestyles and individual circumstances builds rapport, and guess what, trust.

The Solution

So how can your organisation deliver a customer experience that builds and maintains trust? Mystery shopping is a flexible, real-life research tool, ideally placed to capture how your customers really feel when they interact with your company, whilst also ensuring you are meeting your legal compliance requirements.

Key Moments

Know Your Market’s bespoke mystery shopping programmes focus on key moments in the financial services customer journey measuring how well your staff provide and gather information, show empathy with the customer, fulfil legal compliance criteria, and deliver a seamless customer experience. Interactions covered include initial telephone enquiries, appointment booking, face-to-face consultations and follow-up customer service.

Complete Coverage

The questionnaires are specific to each client (whilst incorporating industry best practice criteria) and can cover every aspect of the process including practicalities such as car parking for physical appointments and being offered a coffee, through to preparing you for what questions they will need to ask you and what documents you need to bring. It’s often the seemingly small things that make the difference in building a trusted rapport with a customer and making sure they sing your praises to friends, family and social media. The detailed shopper comments add colour to the Yes/No checklist questions, ensuring you have a full picture of how the process was for them.

Unique shopper scenarios and detailed briefs enable you to create authentic customer interactions across numerous permutations of lifestyle and financial situations. Measuring how well advisers deal with a variety of set-ups provides opportunities to improve the customer journey and increase staff awareness of the importance of a consumer-centric approach.

Tool for Training

Continual monitoring and feedback over time helps staff internalise the flow and content of a typical interaction so it becomes second-nature to achieve and tick off the practical aspects of a consultation, allowing them to focus instead on building trust and showing empathy with the customer.

Insights are delivered via detailed written reports, quality audio recordings, covert video footage and shopper vox pops explaining how they felt throughout the process. Multi-media report assets bring the findings to life and foster a dynamic learning environment for frontline staff, independent advisers and managers alike.

The next stage? Having built that trust with the customer, make sure you don’t blow it now… And that’s a topic for another time.

What is Business Market Research?

Sun, 20 Jun 2021 20:08:20 GMT

A key objective of most research is to get closer to your customers, or potential customers, to find out everything you can about them, in relation to your product or service.

Business Market Research, or B2B Research, as it is commonly known, is no different. Your customers just happen to be other businesses, individuals, or departments within those businesses rather than members of the general public, or consumers.

The biggest difference between B2B market research and consumer market research is the type of people you need to talk to for your project. And getting a group of business people to answer your questions can be more challenging than finding a sample of consumers, even consumers within a very niche interest area or geographic region.

The challenge comes in a number of areas:

Locating the right sort of respondents in the first place
Getting their contact details
Overcoming their suspicion of being sold to
Overcoming their lack of time or inclination to participate
Not being able to use financial incentives commonly used to engage consumer participants

There are however, a number of ways that these challenges can be surmounted, to find an appropriate business market research sample, where expert research providers or partners can help:

B2B Online Panel Provider. This can be a good option if your business serves a broad, non-specific, business target market. It is virtually impossible to recruit a tightly defined audience this way. but it is probably the most cost-effective way to achieve a highly robust sample size. Panels will reward participation which helps (a bit).
Social Media. LinkedIn has been shown to work as a B2B recruitment tool although you will have to pay the platform to target the type of individuals you want and probably pay the respondents too. This can be a good first step to recruit a small number of relevant individuals or businesses to take part in something like an online focus group. Where done by an external research provider, it will deliver increased engagement levels and limit scepticism around covert selling. Incentives can also be offered.
Events/Conferences. Tricky at the moment, although virtual events still offer a forum in which to invite participants to take part in a research project. This method allows you to target a highly relevant captive market although response rates will vary, based upon subject material and target profiling.
Member lists/Personal Contacts. GDPR permitting, member associations may be prepared to send members research invitations on behalf of third party research agencies. This can be a highly effective way to canvas opinion within a specific sector whilst protecting member privacy. Failing that, leverage your own contact book. Depending on your target market, acquaintances within and without your own sector can contribute hugely to answer some research questions or to explore common issues and pain points for a wide range of businesses. (Works well combined with LinkedIn, provided the topic is not too confidential).

Other types of research objectives commonly pursued by businesses, whether their customers are other businesses or regular consumers, are to monitor market trends and to keep an eye on what the competition is doing.

This might include buying or accessing secondary research data from organisations such as government departments, trade associations or commercial market research publishers. This kind of research is often time-consuming and complex and is best combined with some primary forms of research (see above) to be sure of obtaining up to date and relevant data. A good research agency can save you a lot of time by curating a large quantity of sources and extracting the most value to achieve your business objectives.

For small business market research, desk research can be conducted, either internally or via a third-party agency, to supplement official secondary data sources. This can be a particularly helpful exercise if you want to profile key competitors and compare and contrast pricing, service/product features and marketing strategy.

Using an external partner facilitates this process for a number of reasons including impartial methodology; extra capacity and resource to conduct the research; anonymity; and the ability to pose as a customer to find out detailed commercial information.

Hopefully this has given you some food for thought if you are thinking of approaching a business audience for a research project, are planning some desk research on your competitors, or want to explore the state of play in a particular industry sector.

If you need expert help to plan, execute and deliver actionable, market research for business, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Insights Team here at Know Your Market. We love a challenge and we are excellent listeners.

Secret Shoppers. What's the big secret?

Sun, 20 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Is there really a secret? It really depends upon the way you look at it.

Very few know that up to 500,000 people in the UK are registered as Secret Shoppers, (or Mystery Shoppers as they are known), but in reality less than 10% of those are regularly dedicated to the task. So it can be regarded as a specialist field.

On the other hand, Mystery Shopping does exactly what it says on the tin. And the clue of course is in the name. A shopping assessment of a service is carried out by an unknown person, measured against precise criteria. The specific instance is the only secret. And there's a lot of planning, preparation and skill in getting it right.

From the extensive database of registered UK secret shoppers, local people can be selected, who then pose as real-life customers whilst assessing customer service levels and reporting back on their experience.

Using secret shoppers who live close to the business being assessed, with all the local knowledge they possess, ensures a completely authentic and realistic interaction with members of the business staff; helping to keep that secret shopper, well, secret.

Secret shoppers employ a wide variety of methods to assess the sales and service of a business, from a simple online enquiry via a website or social media page, through to a physical face to face visit or scheduled appointment.

Selecting one of these methods of mystery shopping, enables businesses of all types to assess a specific part of their customer journey, such as initial enquiries by phone; or by combining different methods they can assess their omni-channel customer experience, from website browsing through to in-store experience and sales follow-up.

The secret shopper is the key to measuring your progress towards your business goals, unlocking the issues that impede progress, and ultimately achieving customer experience nirvana.

Face to face mystery shopping assignments can also be recorded using covert video equipment. Mystery Shopping companies and secret shoppers will have their own recording equipment, and so can offer you the opportunity to play back and listen to the interaction, as if you were actually there.

Video footage is a fabulous medium to really bring findings to life for training purposes or to get buy in to the mystery shopping process from other stakeholders in your business. Not to mention providing irrefutable proof of who said what and how the interaction played out.

The equipment sounds complicated and very 007, but secret shopper equipment is highly discreet and comes in the form of a button-hole camera or hidden camera within the lining of a bag. Secret shoppers ensure they capture a good amount of headshot footage, so you can really assess your staff members’ body language and facial expression as well as the spoken sales process and customer experience delivery.

Once the secret shopper has completed their assignment, they will report back in a bespoke written report, which covers all aspects of the interaction from a sales process and customer experience point of view. Audio and video files (where applicable) should also be provided via an online results portal. This provides a client business with relevant, actionable insights into their staff’s performance, highlighting what is being done well and where there is room for improvement.

These very specific insights should feed into the creation or adaptation of training plans, breaking the interaction and sales process down into manageable sections that staff can learn and practise. The success of these training plans can then be monitored during future secret shopper projects to celebrate improvement and continual progression towards business objectives.

Although there is emphasis on the secret shopper being a complete mystery (the clue’s in the name!) staff should always be aware that they may be mystery shopped; they just don’t know when or where.

Implementing a professional and fair secret shopper programme encourages your team to go above and beyond as they serve customers on a daily basis. It creates a positive learning environment for staff and can even be used as part of a financial incentive programme. For example, one of our clients gives members of their team £100 if they score 100% on their mystery shop. It doesn’t get much more motivating than that!

If you would like to find out more about our Mystery Shopping services and how they can benefit your business, please contact the Know Your Market Insight Services Team on info@knowyourmarket.net