The Market Research Society (MRS) defines mystery shopping as :

‘The use of individuals trained to experience and measure any customer service process, by acting as potential customers and in some way reporting back on their experiences in a detailed and objective way.’

Mystery shopping is a long-established research technique and is used extensively in many industry sectors, such as retail and hospitality, to measure the quality of service provided.

In financial services industry, mystery shopping is not a new thing. Many large financial services providers use mystery sh`opping to evaluate their competitors and their own sales staff, to improve customer services and asses compliance.

Why Financial Services Company use Mystery Shopping?

Mystery shopping gives a detailed insight into the way financial products are sold to consumers.

Financial services company typically conduct mystery shopping because it fills the gap between retrospective consumer research and formal supervisory visits to assess compliance and sales documentation.

In the evolving regulatory environment, there is an increasing need for financial services companies to collect evidence about whether they have complied with the government’s policy as expected and at the same time, whether they provide the best service to their customer.

In particular, financial services company need to measure and evaluate the impact of government policy to their customer experience and assess their compliance level to government policy.

Understanding your customers, their expectations and product interests is as important as ever. In every industry, it’s more profitable to serve existing customers than to acquire new ones.

The financial services sector is no different. However, due to regulations, compliance requirements and complexity of product offerings, employee interaction with your customers is a crucial component.

As much as you would like to, you cannot be at every location all of the time to ensure that your front-line staff is carrying out your brand promise.  But we can.
Evaluate’s mystery shopping program can help you determine the branch appearance for overall attractiveness as well as determining how well it adheres to corporate core standards, policy and procedures.

We also understand that every company is unique, that is why we offer a tailor made mystery shopping program for each financial services company focusing on:

    •  Overall customer experience
    •  Compliance
    •  Staff friendliness and engagement skills
    •  Staff knowledge
    •  Sales & service processes
    •  On-site branding
    •  Training needs and effectiveness

Our reports are designed to measure the customer visit experience and identify key areas to improve on. Each company can have their own unique set of data based on their operational needs.

This information gives management invaluable customer perspective and a measurable quality of your operations results and it will become powerful over time as cumulative data shows important trends.

The information also provides opportunities to recognize outstanding employee performance, branch performance, management performance and training results.