The reports and spreadsheets that flood your desk are not the only tools you should be using while tracking sales performance KPIs. They are highly valuable, but do they really deliver the whole picture? 

Nope! Not by a long shot. And while receipt, phone, and internet surveys can help bridge the gap in some ways, they are very old-school and deliver little if any real value.

Mystery shoppers can be the missing piece of the puzzle you’ve been looking for to get a complete picture of your business through tracking sales performance. But to do this, you must consistently employ them so you can match details of specific performance trends to the hard data.

NUMBERS DON’T TELL THE WHOLE STORY

Sales reports and KPIs are popular metrics for tracking sales performance, but the problem with them is that humans can’t be reduced to an Excel spreadsheet. It turns out we are heavily driven by our emotions, and that’s why the effectiveness of sales calls is much more difficult to analyze beyond success and failure. 

Mystery shoppers are a key tool to learning why your customers buy what they buy, shop where they shop, and if they are ever coming back. It takes time for a human to evaluate emotions, and because mystery shoppers pose as customers, they will directly experience how your team and business policies impact your customers.

Evaluate Customer Service

If you’re watching over their shoulder, or if they feel like they’re being otherwise evaluated, your employees will act differently than they will with regular customers. It’s just a fact of human nature. So if your sales are rising or falling unexpectedly with no clear reason in the reports, your customer service should be a top concern.

While a sales call can feel highly personal, the fact is, customer service is about delivering consistent information and driving a lead toward value. Things like ensuring your salespeople use effective language for setting appointments and confirming them, for instance, can be easily identified during a mystery call, but a sales report simply points to an outcome that could be for many reasons. If you use mystery shoppers on a regular basis, you will be able to tie your metrics to actions on calls, not guess at the problem. 

Verify Compliance with Corporate Policies and the Law

These twin items are of critical importance to maintaining a healthy bottom line. Virtually every dealership of any sort has its own best practices and government regulations with which they must comply. 

If overall employee compliance is eroding, mystery shoppers will tell you before it becomes a significant problem. Considering the expensive implications of a failure to adhere to a franchising agreement, or worse, lawsuits and legal repercussions? You definitely want to catch these items early before they cause a really big problem.

Measuring Social Skills

It’s an open secret that, with the rise of the internet, social skills are in decline across nearly every part of the human experience. The isolation, loss of social norms, lower levels of interaction, reduced empathy, etc. caused by an over-reliance on digital devices and communication are affecting your customers as well as your team. 

That means intrapersonal skills are actually becoming more important these days. Customers who are less socially-abled will require superior interpersonal skills from your employees if you want to escort them to a sale. That’s one of the many reasons phone scripts are such an important point of any dealership’s game—they ensure customers are compassionately and consistently helped every step of the way and no revenue opportunity is left on the table.

A good mystery shopper will deliver the unvarnished truth of how your people’s people skills are measuring up. By matching this data with numbers collected while tracking sales performance, you’ve got yet another powerful tool at your command.

Verify Training Effectiveness 

Just because mystery shopping is intended to mimic an actual call doesn’t mean there aren’t goals. Because mystery shoppers work with you to develop an in-depth evaluation form, they’re able to measure how consistently and effectively your team is employing the training you’ve been paying for. 

And as training gets forgotten or drifts over time, you definitely want to know if it’s having an effect on the numbers you’re collecting while tracking sales performance. It will help you identify the best intervals for retraining and map overall skill growth.

Confirm Training Quality

Your people are out there in the trenches every day, and they know your customers well. If your training is obsolete or just plain bad, trust us, they know. 

If your training is based on poor assumptions, is deficient in its quality, or if the people performing the training are not up to the task, mystery shoppers will identify these problems. After all, they don’t strictly follow the evaluation form you drew up with them. A mystery shopper has the freedom and the responsibility to investigate other issues as they arise.

COMBINE MYSTERY SHOPPING AND TRAINING

Now that you see how accurately tracking sales performance requires mystery shopping, you can take the next step: combining your training program and mystery shoppers into a unified whole.

Phone Ninjas has built our entire business on this core philosophy. Mike Hoyser, our VP of Training, personally works with your team for initial analysis and strategy. Our Phone Ninjas then coach them individually over time to optimize learning and growth. Finally, our mystery shoppers verify the training so we can follow up with additional coaching if needed. 

This process is entirely hands-off for you, so you can focus on developing your business. We’re so confident of our integrated approach that we offer a free demo and two free mystery shops with no further commitment. If you choose to hire us, we work on a month-to-month basis so you can maximize your training budget without getting locked into long-term contracts.

Call or email us today so we can help transform your bottom line!