“Inspect What You Expect.”
Employees and team members are inherently critical for many businesses. If you have them, you know the health and profitability of your business is directly related to how employees and team members are interacting with each other, your customers and vendors. Therefore it’s critical you have a system in place to inspect what is going on in your business when you’re not explicitly watching.
One way to accomplish this is to hire “mystery shoppers.” Hired as independent contractors, mystery shoppers are “posers” operating in stealth-like fashion to assess your business operations. They are charged with specific tasks such as taking photographs, purchasing a product or service, returning a product, registering complaints, asking questions of salespeople and behaving in other ways similar to how a real customer would act.
The whole point is to inspect how your employees and team members are interacting with your customers. Are they doing the right things? Are they saying the right things? The mystery shoppers will then report back to the business owner with details about their experiences. Many times, the results are scary. Be prepared to be shocked at what you discover.
Do a web search on “mystery shoppers” to learn more about creating your own system or hiring a professional firm to do it for you. Read “No B.S. Ruthless Management of People and Profits: No Holds Barred, Kick Butt, Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Really Getting Rich” by Dan Kennedy for more ideas on inspecting what you expect.