Mystery Shopping in India appears as a great concept to gauge the details which are not enclosed by customers. In the automotive industry, it is even more important to get help from such a service because this industry has always been backed by providing great customer satisfaction and experience.
So, you must know if the customer experience in your dealership is good or not. Well, automotive mystery shopping is absolutely here to help which is a dedicated service designed to take care of automotive dealerships. In this blog, we'll discover how Automotive Mystery Shopping helps to enhance the existing business and how you can create a mystery shopping program for your dealership.
Understanding Automotive Mystery Shopping
Mystery shopping is a service in which a business's operations that directly deal with customers are assessed from a customer's point of view. It is a very popular and tested service that discloses a lot of details about your business, which are often missed due to a lack of customers' perspectives. In the automotive industry, it simply works by sending a mystery shopper to the dealership who assesses everything from the staff to everything else in the store.
It is an important service for those in the automotive industry because you can learn about a lot of things through this service. From identifying staff behaviour to evaluating the pros and cons of a store's appearance, all this can be assessed by a mystery audit and help you make strategies for a change.
How Mystery Shopping Boosts Sales?
Enhances Customer Experience
Automotive mystery shopping is a great way to enhance the experience of the customers by identifying their pain points. Yes, with the mystery shopping program, you can learn about the pain points that exist in the customer's experience but are not being pinpointed. For instance, if a customer comes into the car dealership and asks the staff about what car he should buy? Now, the answer to this question must start by asking the customer about their requirements. But if the staff instead starts to talk about any car, it will most probably lead to a failed pitch.
While a customer may not be able to tell you clearly that it's the staff's mistake that they didn't ask about his requirements, a mystery shopper will easily identify the mistake. And with a simple addition based on this pain point, the customer experience will rise exponentially.
Identifying and Implementing Best-Suited Sales Strategies
The automotive industry is a prime example of how sales strategies work. However, the problem is that the seller has a significant role in the success of a sales strategy. So, it's not like if you know a sales strategy, then you can implement it as well. And that's a big reason why car dealerships often face a loss due to improper sales strategies.
With automotive mystery shopping, you can know if your sellers have enough knowledge about the strategies and their implementation or not. For instance, upselling, which is a popular sales strategy, can increase your revenue by 10-30%. However, it depends on the sales executive to pitch an upselling strategy smoothly. A mystery shopper assesses the abilities of sales executives in a car showroom and notes down if they used any sales strategy and if they were successful or not.
Gauges the Indirect Factors
Apart from the pain points and sales strategies, there are a lot of other things as well that contribute to a successful automotive business, like the cleanliness of the store, product placement, and many more. During mystery shopping audits, these are also the factors that a mystery shopper looks at.
With a clean dealership, you can make sure that nothing is annoying a customer about being there. Additionally, product placement makes a lot of difference, sometimes with an upselling pitch. If you place your high-end cars or bikes in the low ends in the back, then the customers who walk in for an affordable car will go through all the high-end and medium-priced cars, and they may decide to go with an expensive one for better features. In an opposite setting, your sales executive may never get an opportunity to introduce the other cars.
How to Create an Effective Mystery Shopping Program?
The process of setting up a mystery shopping program starts with multiple steps to perform one by one. For a successful mystery shopper audit, here's how you have to plan everything:
Identify Your Goals
Start with clearly understanding your goals. It is about what you want to achieve with the results of mystery shopping. It can be an increase in customer satisfaction, loyalty experience, etc. Moreover, you may need to understand the reason why you get fewer sales, fewer repeat purchases, etc. It is important to identify these goals in the beginning for a single reason that the mystery shopper will align with them. With this expertise, the mystery auditor will be able to know where he has to put the most attention.
Hire a Mystery Shopper
Now comes the need to hire a mystery auditor. People often think that since they want to look at the customer's perspective, anybody can do this work. But there's a huge difference between a normal person and a mystery shopper. First of all, the difference lies in the expertise that a mystery shopper has. They can look at every little detail from start to finish while also focusing on the main functions. Moreover, mystery shoppers understand when things are right or wrong.
Let's say you ask a person to check if the sales executive is able to upsell him or not. Now, if that person takes it as a goal to not get up-sealed, he will just keep denying the efforts made by the executive. On the other hand, a mystery shopper will be able to understand at which point a real customer will be convinced.
Pro Tip: Hire a business consultant company that offers mystery shopping to get a customized mystery shopping program along with well-trained mystery shoppers.
Analyze the Mystery Shopping Data
Now, once the automotive mystery shopping is done, it's time to take the data and interpret it. The mystery shopper gives the mystery shopping feedback, which you have to get actionable insights. The best way to do so is to hire a consultant. A mystery shopping service provider will accurately interpret the insights that you can use in your business.
Use the Insights and Take Action
Once you have the data, you can use it to make changes to make things better. For instance, if you get to know about discrepancies in staff behavior, then you can train them to get rid of such discrepancies.
Wrapping Up
Automotive mystery shopping is a transformative tool for improving both sales performance and customer loyalty in the highly competitive automotive industry. By uncovering hidden gaps in customer experience, evaluating sales strategies, and addressing indirect factors like ambiance and product placement, dealerships can elevate their operations to new heights.
In a market like India, where customer expectations are diverse and competition is fierce, investing in a well-structured mystery shopping program is not just beneficial—it’s essential. With actionable insights from professional mystery audits, dealerships can create memorable customer experiences that lead to long-term growth and success.
