Customer service has become more important than ever these days, with a shifting economy and rising access to online resources. Phones are still the go-to appointment-setting tool for dealerships, and with 75% of people trying new shopping behaviors during the pandemic, making the most of every minute of your phone traffic is critical.
Unfortunately, measuring the effectiveness of your phone strategy can be tough. Customer surveys have very low return rates and produce little actionable data. Manager evaluations are better, but employees always act differently when they’re in the room. So, what is the best way to evaluate and improve your team’s real-world performance?
Mystery shops are the gold standard, giving you an unfiltered look at your team’s real-world performance. Let’s talk about what mystery shops are, why they’re effective, and how they lead to higher appointment rates and increased sales.
What Goes Into a Mystery Shop?
Mystery shops are calls to your dealership from anonymous professionals that are designed to analyze and review your team’s performance on the phone. These independent contractors can explore any aspect of your phone strategy and give you hard data and training points to leverage.
Here’s how they work:
- A consultant meets with you to find out what points are critical to evaluate, as well as other areas that may be worth looking at.
- A detailed game plan is compiled so all mystery shoppers have a solid roadmap to evaluate your dealership.
- The shopper calls your business posing as a customer.
- Over the course of the call, the shopper evaluates all aspects of the agent’s customer interaction skills. They often have specific questions to ask, tasks to perform, information to collect or verify, and policies/product knowledge to evaluate.
- An in-depth analysis is performed by the mystery shopping agency, and a report is prepared.
- Employers are presented with a complete overview of all aspects of an employee’s performance.
- The agency follows up with your training partner so they can perform targeted coaching to address deficiencies and missed sales and service opportunities.
Benefits for Your Dealership
Mystery shops are a proven business evaluation model that provides a clear path from performance to value. By analyzing specific language around appointment setting, handling objections, and many other aspects of your phone strategy, these tools give your team reliable coaching points directly tied to your KPIs.
Mystery shops help you:
- Fully leverage all available add-on sales and services
- Ensure brand message is uniform, consistent, and on point
- Verify compliance with the law, company policies, and procedures
- Measure the success of your training investments
- Evaluate all phases of your customer experiences, including areas like greetings, gathering information, qualification, appointment setting, and closing
- Provide detailed follow-up reports for your training partner to maximize your investment
- Offers unexpected details of the customer experience that allow you to evaluate current policies and procedures for future fine-tuning
What to Look For in a Mystery Shopping Partner
There are plenty of automotive consultants and mystery shopping firms out there, but here’s what you should expect from a top-performing partner.
- Month-to-month contracts. Businesses must be able to pivot quickly when a partnership isn’t working out, and long-term agreements lock you into a major financial commitment that offers zero flexibility.
- Face-to-face relationship. An agency should offer in-depth discussions about your needs and design customized and realistic shopping scenarios for your business and local community. They should also provide evaluation forms to cover the areas you require, and deliver extremely detailed reports that highlight follow-up training opportunities. Avoid one-size-fits-all solutions.
- Highly-trained shoppers. Mystery shopping is a skill. Any partner you work with should have experienced professionals on the phones who mine critical information without giving away their identity.
- Connected to coaching. Mystery shopping goes hand-in-hand with coaching, and ideally, the two should be operating through your dealership training partner.
- Data-driven results. Any mystery shopping firm should be able to tie their work to numbers and paint a clear path to key metrics like higher appointment rates.
Phone Ninjas Does it All
Here at Phone Ninjas, we’ve got decades of experience helping the nation’s top dealerships deploy coaching strategies that lead directly to doubling or even tripling their appointment rates.
We conduct our own mystery shops in-house so we can tie them directly to our coaching strategy and dealership needs. That’s why we deliver results that lead directly to meeting monthly goals, and we work with our clients on a month-to-month basis for maximum security and flexibility. We’re also an open book—you can check out our actual mystery shop methodology with an example of one of our real mystery shops.
Reach out today for a free demo and two free mystery shops to find out how we can boost your appointment rate to 60% or more.
