Why you shouldn't put 'difficult' Customer behavior into your Mystery Shopper program

About twice a year, on average, we receive a request from a Mystery Shopper Client to incorporate 'difficult Customer' scenarios into their research program.

Whenever this comes up I get a bit of a twinge reaction and set out to do my best to explain why doing this is probably not a very good idea.

What do we mean by difficult?

Of course, testing difficult scenarios is common - particularly in the Contact Centre environment as the nature of the enquiries are becoming more complex with more human emotion attached.

So yes - testing difficult scenarios is perfectly fine.

But when our Clients say difficult - what they are referring to is the Customer behavior itself - aside from the issue at hand the Mystery Shopper is supposed to be annoying, or repetitive or sarcastic or what have you.

Before providing a recommendation on how to 'test' and help with difficult Customer behavior (at the end of this short article), let me share why we argue against doing this. 

Don't betray your Staff

The first and perhaps most compelling reason not to include difficult Customer situations into Mystery Shopper research is that it reflects a betrayal by management to Frontline staff. 

The job of dealing with Customers day in and day out, hour after hour, is a tough one.  Particularly in this day and age where simple interactions have gone digital leaving behind the more complex and challenging. 

Adding in another ‘angry’ or ‘frustrated’ or ‘irritated’ Customer to the work life of their Team Members – who already have ‘enough’ of these situations already – shows a lack of care and concern by management. 

Imagine a difficult Mystery Shopper call or visit that simply ruins the Staff’s day, hampers their motivation, or causes distress – and later on the Staff finds out that the management did this to them intentionally. 

We may have scenarios that are difficult – that’s expected.  But we don’t have scenarios where the Customer themselves is difficult.

It's hard to simulate - meaning it goes 'under' or 'over' the mark in terms of the way 'real' Customers behave 

Another compelling reason not to incorporate difficult Customer behavior into Mystery Shopper is that it is very difficult to ‘calibrate’ the delivery of difficult behavior. 

When you study difficult Customers you learn that there are different ‘flavors’ or types of being difficult – abusive, irritating, unhappy, disappointed, sarcastic and the list goes on. 

When we teach organizations how to handle these types of interactions we teach first that you have to listen and understand which type of difficult Customer scenario you are involved in. 

Equipped with that understanding, you then pull out your toolbox of skills to deal with the situation at hand. 

But Mystery Shoppers like to use their own ‘personal’ forms of being difficult – perhaps drawing on how they behave in real life – or more likely how they have observed difficult Customers in their own lives.

It never sounds very ‘real’ when you listen to the recordings. 

And that defeats the entire purpose of Mystery Shopper which is to evaluate what a 'real' Customer would go through.

Unless very well thought out and designed - it's hard to evaluate

Scoring for ‘difficult’ Customers can be complex and highly subjective – unless a deeply formal methodology for ‘difficult’ has been designed and approved.

There are inherent complexities here. 

But I will always go back to the first point itself - hiring someone to be 'rude' to your Employees seems, well - just wrong.

Our suggestion simple 

Rather than use Mystery Shopper as a research tool, we recommend that our Clients use Digital Call Audit research instead. 

You simply go through you vast amounts of digital call files and either via call logging or search mechanisms, you pull the ‘real’ calls where the Customer was flagged as difficult.  

Our official term for this is that you 'pluck' out the relevant calls for study and evaluation by a professional evaluator.

There is nothing quite like listening to a ‘real’ Customer being difficult rather than inflicting an actor trained to be difficult upon a Frontline Team Member.

Thanks for reading!

Daniel 

 Daniel Ord / daniel.ord@omnitouchinternational.com 

Daniel Ord, an American national and 16+ year Singapore Permanent Resident, is a 30 year veteran of the Service Management/Contact Centre industry and is the Founder of OmniTouch International, a 14+ year old Service, Sales & Experience consultancy. 

Daniel has a 15 year background in teaching operations, people management, leadership, customer experience, communication skills, sales and more - with more than 50,000 folks in more than 20 countries to date.