4 Keys to Designing a Successful Secret-Shopper Strategy

// By Lisa D. Ellis //

Steven Maskell, chief client officer and partner at SeeLevel HX

It’s no coincidence that people who like the Apple brand tend to be loyal customers, keeping all of their technology purchases within the Apple family. This is because Apple goes to great lengths to ensure its customers always have a very positive, consistent experience in stores, online, and by phone, according to Steven Maskell, chief client officer and partner at SeeLevel HX, a customer experience organization based in Atlanta that serves a range of clients, including those in health care.

So how does Apple do it? The secrets to Apple’s success — and that of so many other popular brands — are many, but they share one common element that can apply to health care organizations looking to maximize their potential.

The Path to Successful Customer Service

Companies like Apple typically employ a well-designed secret-shopping program (also called mystery shopping) to ensure that products and experiences continually live up to customers’ expectations, keeping them coming back for more. These programs allow companies to hear the customer’s voice and see things from the customer’s perspective. That’s why SeeLevel uses mystery-shopping programs as part of its approach to help businesses and organizations gain more traction in the marketplace.

Maskell says health care organizations that want to achieve similar results can use secret shoppers to constantly monitor their performance and find out how to make improvements to keep people within the system. He points out that satisfied customers refer family and friends, which means providing consistently good customer service also helps grow more business.

“About 30 to 40 percent of new business or growth typically comes from existing customers, so organizations need to ask what they are doing to leverage that and to promote positive word of mouth,” Maskell says.

One-Time Problem or Ongoing Need?

If your health system uses secret shoppers in some capacity (as many organizations do), but you’re not sure if you truly get the full benefits, Maskell suggests stepping back to evaluate your efforts and make corrections as needed.

Secret-shopping programs typically fall under one of the following two categories:

1. Designed to address a short-term need or problem, such as to make sure that staff is adopting a new operational policy you are implementing and to make sure people are aware of the change and following it properly.
2. Engineered to understand how you serve patients day after day. “Just because you were good six months ago does not mean you are doing well today,” Maskell says. “We encourage people to get ongoing feedback. The frequency varies from client to client, depending on their needs. It could be quarterly, monthly, or even weekly. If you’re looking to provide a best-in-class experience for your patients, then ongoing feedback is important,” he says.

If you fall into the second category — desiring ongoing feedback to fully understand your organization’s performance, including its strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities, and to help you make needed improvements, you probably wonder how to know if your secret-shopping program is set up properly to live up to its potential.

4 Questions to Guide Your Efforts

The best way to assess your efforts is to ask yourself these four questions:

Question #1: Is there a defined vision and concrete goals to guide your secret-shopping program?

The best secret-shopping strategies start with a vision of where the organization is and where it wants to go, Maskell says. It’s also important to know how the customer fits within these goals. Without this foundation to direct your efforts, the information alone won’t be enough to help you make needed change.

“Mystery shopping gives you a good objective mirror of what is really happening,” he says. For instance, you may get data from customer surveys that show people are particularly delighted with your service at one location, but you may not know exactly what is working. Are staff members calling your patients by name? Are they offering them a glass of water? It’s important to find out what is working so you can make sure to continue using this method and then be able to share it with other locations where the service isn’t receiving the same high marks.

“Mystery shopping can tell you what you are doing right, and where you need to make improvements,” he says. “It also provides metrics you can measure against.”

Here’s another example of how this can be beneficial: “Someone might perceive the wait time at a practice is really long and report this on the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) survey. This is perception and based on that, the medical staff may feel a need to bring in more personnel. But mystery shopping gives you quantifiable information” so you see the full picture, Maskell says. Mystery shopping may tell you that wait time is really only 15 seconds, but it may feel like an eternity because patients aren’t engaged when they sit in the waiting room. Therefore, you need to find an engagement strategy to help them feel the process is moving along while they wait.

Question #2: Do you have good buy-in from your staff on your secret-shopping program?

A client recently told Maskell that one of his best managers had called and said he spotted a mystery shopper. “The manager was so excited and said he gave extraordinary service to the shopper. But when I looked up the information, I found that the patient wasn’t a secret shopper at all. The manager had over-served a real customer!” This shows that the organization had done a great job of getting its staff members excited about doing a great job and getting people to appreciate getting high marks for their efforts from shoppers.

Question #3: Do you use your secret-shopping results to recognize outstanding performance?

“We do a lot of secret-shopping programs to highlight people who are doing a great job,” Maskell says. “For instance, I just worked with a client whose CEO sends a personal thank-you note to staff who have done well on their mystery-shopping results.” This shows how mystery shopping has changed in the past decade or two from being a way to shame people for poor performance to being a way to identify areas with potential to improve and also to recognize people for what they do well and encourage them to continue. Recognizing people for their performance is also a great way to encourage other staff members to follow their example.

Question #4: Do you use your secret-shopper results to provide tips to help staff make meaningful changes?

At SeeLevel, the results from secret-shopping programs are presented to clients in a written report that includes what the organization does well, any missed opportunities, and where change is needed. Embedded in this report are tips that can help address any gaps or things that need to be changed. Having such concrete feedback is critical to help organization achieve their goals.

“The key is to communicate with the staff the reasons behind the behaviors asked,” Maskell says. “For instance, Chick-fil-A’s ‘My Pleasure’ response [to customers who make a request] has been ingrained in the culture over the years. Customers keep reporting it as a ‘brand attribute’ — something unique that sets them apart. In health care, there are already many do’s and don’ts that employees have to adhere to based on regulation, so even more ‘rules’ might not be the right approach. Research keeps showing that patients want (but don’t expect!) to be treated as people, not patients,” he says.

Designing an Effective Strategy

Armed with all of the right elements to guide your secret-shopper strategy, you can determine what form your secret-shopping efforts will take.

“I would recommend that health care organizations start small and work through the whole process in phases. This will make sure you can take the findings and implement improvements before moving on to the next step to evaluate,” Maskell says, adding that secret-shopping formats change quickly as the marketplace changes.

“These days we do an online mystery shopping program that includes the use of mobile applications. One example is a food-on-demand study, where mystery shoppers used the mobile apps from UberEats, GrubHub, and others to order online food and evaluate the process. They never even left their home,” he says.

In this way, secret shoppers have overlapped with what would be described as “user testing” in the digital realm, but they can explore the customer experience both online and offline.

While most secret-shopper campaigns do get to the heart of their mission, it’s important to know that they may not always reach the specific goal you had established upfront. That’s because some campaigns provide a valuable way to test assumptions — and offer insight to let you know when these assumptions are not on target and how to correct them.

“A lot of campaigns are started with an assumption or goal. Often the assumptions turn out not to be true. It’s very rare to have a campaign fail, but finding unexpected outcomes is more or less standard,” Maskell says.

How the Investment Pays Off

When you invest in a secret-shopping program, your efforts should pay off on a number of levels, Maskell says, including improving your organization’s performance and helping it gain a competitive edge.

“Companies that check their performance versus those that don’t create a more agile culture that focuses on continuous improvement. In addition, companies that check on their competitors’ performance as well will have a better insight in how they actually differ from their competitors,” he says.

“The right programs are focused on celebrating outstanding performance and helping create a workplace that celebrates success,” he says, adding, “This ensures that customers will have a memorable experience so they will want to come back again and again.”

Lisa D. Ellis is a contributing writer for Strategic Health Care Marketing. She is a journalist and content development specialist who helps hospitals and other health care providers and organizations shape strategic messages and communicate them to their target audiences. You can reach her at lisa.ellis@strategicHCmarketing.com.