IMPROVING NETWORK PERFORMANCE
Through Mystery Shopping

The continued excellence of your franchise network rests on many critical components. The power of your brand, your systems, and the way your franchisees perform their role each play their part in the success of your franchise network. With regular reporting of KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) a franchisor can measure many key items necessary for knowing how the business and network is tracking. The numbers may indicate that things are not as they ought to be, and regular checks will provide you with trends over time. But how can you truly pinpoint the problem? Mystery shopping may well be the tool you need.

What is mystery shopping? Mystery shopping goes by many guises. Common examples include secret shopping, mystery customers, spotters, anonymous audits, quality audits, service investigations, virtual customers and telephone checks. Despite all the names, mystery shopping typically involves evaluating operational, product, and service and/or customer service aspects of an organisation. Mystery shoppers receive specific training for each assignment, and will often (but not always) pose as customers. Detailed evaluations including written reports and/or questionnaires are provided following each mystery shopping assignment.

Mystery shopping provides franchisors with a means of monitoring service and operations from a consumer perspective (And what perspective is more important than that?).

Who uses mystery shopping?
There is almost no business where some form of mystery shopping program would not be effective. In the franchise community, mystery shopping campaigns are utilised by a wide range of product and service concepts, such as fast food, lawn mowing, real estate, travel, and even optometry.

Mystery shopping is well proven tool, having been used by many franchise companies over prolonged periods of time, whether to evaluate employee sales skills, employee product knowledge, quality, cleanliness, franchise sales processes, competitor activity etc.

Progressive franchisors will integrate mystery shopping programs with franchisee training/incentive programs and customer satisfaction measurement.

What you can measure you can manage

Key benefits
The benefits of mystery shopping are proven and numerous:

• Cross sectional and longitudinal performance can be monitored effectively
• Training needs can be identified
• Franchisees and employees can be monitored, managed and rewarded
• Customer satisfaction can be improved

Steps to a mystery shopping campaign
Step 1. Setting objectives and goals
Step 2. Programmes or questionnaire design
Step 3. Assigning the appropriate shoppers
Step 4. Data collection
Step 5. Data preparation
Step 6. Reporting
Step 7. Review findings

The mystery shopping campaign must be carefully designed to ensure goals and objectives are realistically achieved, and the process is a positive, motivating experience for all parties involved.

Franchisors that fail to continuously measure the performance of their systems and franchisees often realise that there is a problem when it's too late. Performance must be measured regularly to avoid a major setback later on.

At Franchize Consultants (NZ) Ltd we work with both franchisors and franchisees to prescribe and action the necessary steps to produce meaningful improvements - that increase profitability and long-term success for all parties.

For more information contact Win Robinson on 09 523 3858 or email (win@fcnzl.co.nz)

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