This year, Service Intelligence took advantage of the latest trends in mobile data collection to complete our annual petroleum-convenience store benchmarking study with CSP.
Thrilled with the results, we wanted to give you a look at these trends, and some insights into how you can adopt them to measure your performance and drive improvement across your locations.
Trend: Crowd-Sourced Mystery Shopping
Business Goal: Collect feedback about in-store performance
How It Works: Crowd-sourced mystery shopping sends an open call to a large database of potential customers, notifying them of a survey to complete the next time they visit a location. It is unlike traditional mystery shopping, for which professional, trained shoppers are assigned specific shops, locations and due dates.
When the customers finish their shop, they open an application on their phone or tablet and answer a few questions about their experience. Companies can use this opportunity to collect feedback about their in-store experience and customer service levels.
The benefits are many:
▶ Cost-Effective: Crowd-sourced mystery shopping targets individuals who are already patronizing your locations and therefore require less incentive for completion. The survey is shorter and does not require editing or proofing, making it a cost-effective way to gather key information about your in-store performance on an ad-hoc basis.
▶ Relevant Feedback: While a standard mystery shopper is a professional shopper completing an assignment, crowd-sourced mystery shopping gives you access to a large database of consumers, likely to be in your target market. So the feedback received is more a picture of your average customer experience vs. specific feedback from a trained shopper looking only for certain standards.
Take the following example. The question “Did the cashier greet you?” was on both the 2013 and 2014 surveys. The results, however, are very different. Tulsa, Okla.-based QuikTrip, for example, scored a 96% in the 2013 mystery shop. Yet, based on the crowd-source model of 2014, its score fell to 88.8%.
A similar decline was found at Sheetz. Last year’s mystery shop gave the Pennsylvania retailer 99%, while this year’s crowd-sourced score was 92.5%.
Why the drop? And which one is more representative of the chain’s true performance?
When performing a standard mystery shop, all shoppers are provided training on standards and criteria on how to respond to each question. This is different from crowd-sourced mystery shopping, in which respondents answer based on their interpretations of their experience. The lower scores in the crowd-sourced model may suggest that while technical standards are being met, untrained customers—and remember, these are your shoppers—have higher expectations from you.
▶ Big Picture: Due to the lower cost and larger database available, you can collect a large number of responses in a relatively short time, yielding data points across multiple experiences instead of just one mystery shop per month. This also gives you the opportunity to ask opinion-based questions (including Net Promoter Score) and pick up on trends sooner.
For instance, in this year’s crowdsourced study, we collected 71% of assignments within the first five days of launching the study, and 91% in the first week. In comparison, it took us roughly six weeks to collect the information.
Among other benefits we see in crowd-sourced surveys is the ability for retailers to change questions frequently without raising the costs. And, in an age of Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, the crowd-sourced approach embraces the positive qualities of social media feedback, while offering companies structured, qualitative data regarding their brand.
CONTINUED: Trend: Mobile Auditing
Trend: Mobile Auditing
Business Goal: Measure execution of standards, flag and ensure opportunities are resolved, identify training needs and operational follow-up required.
How It Works: Performing a mobile audit is not the newest trend in retail management, but the software available to support mobile auditing is improving enough to have a significant effect on your business.
Mobile auditing draws on mobile technology to complete and submit audits. This is sometimes called “forms automation” because it applies to checklists and other data collection in addition to audits. Some solutions also allow for aggregation and reporting of the information collected. As an evolution of pen, paper and data input, mobile data capture decreases processing time, and it may offer the ability to create and send reports with minimal effort.
In the past, mobile data collection was an enterprise-level IT decision, requiring setup costs and a lot of internal resources. This is still true for complex systems with notifications, reporting and other business improvement features. Forms automation, however, is now available on a very cost-effective basis, though it comes only with aggregation and reporting features.
With advancements in mobile technology, there is a growing trend towards Software as a Service (SaaS) applications targeted at mobile use. The next generation of mobile audit software will be much more affordable and provide benefits not available in a form automation engine.
Features in an easy-to-setup SaaS mobile auditing software should allow businesses to set triggers and notifications when issues are found, assign and address questions around follow-up, and report not just on issues and resolution but also the organization’s ability to address them. Put simply, the software should track performance and help improve performance.
▶ Benefits Without the Bucks: New mobile auditing software allows programs and organizations to be set up without the need for internal IT and lengthy customization.
▶ Improve Productivity: It reduces not only the time it takes to manually enter data, but also the time to get value from the data collected. With improved reporting, triggers, notifications and collaboration features built right in, newer mobile audit software can automate recurring processes, prioritize information and allow users to address what’s most important to them, without having to dig around to find it.
▶ Improved Adoption: Newer applications hitting the market seem to be designed with users in mind, with better-looking interfaces, intuitive work flows and other user-driven features. Employees may actually enjoy using the software and see the direct benefits in their roles.
▶ Better-Run Operations: Through the use of annotated photography, blog-like comment strings and other features, issues can be identified and tracked through to resolution. Benchmarking features will ensure that the team being measured focuses on improving.
Final Thought
When you are looking at the current ways you measure your operations (covert, overt or external feedback), pause and ask if mobile technology and software may have something to offer. Is it time to let go of an old method and move toward something that can provide more value?
Software Solution
Finally, there is software that allows you to find, fix and report on the operational compliance issues across your organization without having to go through a large enterprise software buy.
OpsMatrix is an affordable solution with no setup fees or internal IT resourcing required to get started. It knows who you are and where you are, and it gives you the tools in your palm to be more effective with any of your operational compliance audits or checklists. It also has excellent reporting and aggregation features.
Check out OpsMatrix.com for a demonstration and free trial.
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