When you’re evaluating your law firm practices to see what’s working, what isn’t working and what needs to be tweaked… your best source of intel ironically won’t be your current clientele. Rather, it’s with the people who didn’t become clients, or stopped being clients—the ones who got away. Unfortunately, gaining that intel is elusive. As Jobmonkey puts it, 90 percent of unsatisfied clients won’t complain to you: They’ll just go your competitor. That’s where the “mystery shopper” strategy comes in. It can fill in the gaps so you know more about what’s happening.
The concept is simple. Hire someone unknown to your employees to pose as a prospective client. Have this person move through the sales chain from setting the appointment through the initial consultation, making key observations along the way and reporting their experiences back to you. You can arrange for a mystery shopper through a third-party, but it’s just as easy to do it yourself.
Why Hire a Mystery Shopper?
Hiring a mystery shopper to investigate your law firm can quickly yield useful, actionable information about the effectiveness of your sales and service processes, enabling you to identify and correct problem areas you might never have noticed otherwise. For example, you can:
- Find out whether your employees are following prescribed protocols
- Learn whether the customer is made to feel comfortable at each stage of the process
- Discover whether employees follow up with the lead
- Find out whether your team answered all the customer’s questions satisfactorily
- Hear the customer’s unbiased impressions of the law firm based on her experience
- Get feedback on almost any aspect of the sales funnel that you wish to test specifically
Mystery Shopping Best Practices
If you’re implementing a mystery shopper campaign yourself, follow these tips to make the most of the experience:
- Make sure to choose someone your team won’t know. (Even a familiar voice on the phone can be a giveaway.)
- Give your team fair advance notice. Let them know a mystery shopper will be reaching out without letting them know who it is or when it will happen; remind them of your expectations. (Remember, the objective is to learn what’s working, not to trick your employees.)
- Know your objectives. Be clear in your mind about what you want to learn, and make sure the mystery shopper knows what questions to ask. Invite honest feedback from the shopper.
- Review the results with your team. Share the shopper’s feedback so they can learn what worked and what needs to improve.
If you really want to where and how to improve, you have to get into the minds of those people who either didn’t hire you, or fired you. The feedback you receive from a mystery shopper may be surprising and sometimes even difficult to hear; however, but it’s one of the best ways to see past your blind spots. It can allow you to shore up weak spots and improve your results. For further advice on mystery shopping and other business building strategies, give our team a call at (888) 207-2869.
