Service-dependent Industries Use Mystery Shoppers Insight to Guide Success
BRENTWOOD, CA, November 26, 2007
Mercantile Systems, a leading customer experience consulting firm, announced a contract with Devon Self-Storage, the ninth largest self storage company in the country, to perform ongoing sales, service and site evaluations for the Emeryville, California-based company. Devon Self-Storage has 6.1 million square feet of space, and six European sites.
"Applying traditional mystery shopping techniques to the self storage industry is difficult because shoppers must look and sound like typical renters," said Dan Cosgrove, CEO of Mercantile Systems. "Employees often can guess who the shoppers are because they ask different questions - and more of them - than a real renter. We are addressing this by recording actual sales calls to assess the Devon sales process, individual employee and site performance with far greater accuracy."
In addition, Devon will use Mercantile to measure its business in other ways such as physical site surveys, follow-up customer phone surveys, and to reengineer the company's employee/site performance analysis and scoring.
"It's surprising how few service-dependent companies give their employees clear guidance about what is expected of them," Cosgrove said. "We are helping Devon detail every aspect of the employees' sales and service interactions, identify 'best practices' and share their criteria company-wide so that employees are given the tools to improve. Our experience shows that this method invariably helps employees improve their service scores and significantly increase the percentage of prospective tenants that rent from them."
"We needed a company that had the capability to not only provide traditional mystery shopping feedback, but also to analyze and provide actionable data from all our interactions with customers and prospects," said Angus G. Morrison, Sr V.P Operations. "Mercantile has a strong track record of experience in the self storage industry, and a very effective approach to service-dependent businesses like ours."
Based in Brentwood, California, privately-held Mercantile Systems is a leading innovator of programs to help businesses improve their bottom lines through monitoring employees and customers and extracting operational data that helps managers eliminate revenue-eroding issues that plague all service-dependent businesses.