Tell us a little bit about your business
Founded in 2005, Appliances Online is Australia’s largest online appliance retailer and was recently voted by CHOICE as Australia’s Best Electronic Online Store. Appliances Online provides service through free next day delivery, free removal and recycling of old products and 24/7 locally-based customer support.
Even though we’ve served 1.7 million Aussies, we still understand that each experience is unique and we believe in one customer, one experience at a time. With 85% of our customers actively promoting our business to their friends and family, we instinctively understand that the customer is the most important aspect of our business.
Before you started mystery shopping, what challenges were you faced with?
Quality assurance is always difficult on such a large scale, especially within a 24/7 environment.
We currently do not have the resources to dedicate to listening in to every one of our customer service team on a service call. This means that we don’t have the internal capacity to quality check our service levels as much as what we’d like.
With the mystery shopping program with Human Experience, each month we manage to get feedback on the majority of the team. The mystery shopping reports are sent to the Team Leaders who then have coaching conversations with the team.
Tell us about the solution that Human Experience offered you
Human Experience is helping us to identify the issues with our team members’ interactions over the phone with customers, whether it’s their opening, closing, handling queries or working through the customer’s objections.
We receive monthly reports with the scores and feedback relating back to our specific Appliances Online service standards. We are then able to take those reports and have coaching conversations with our team members to help them improve the service they are providing to our customers every day.
How have you used the mystery shopping feedback as a management tool?
We use the feedback to have 1 on 1 coaching conversations with the team members. We complete roleplays in these conversations and the team leader gives the team members the next steps from here. These conversations are being held monthly.
Tell us about the results you’ve seen in your business since you started mystery shopping.
Team members take the feedback on board and we have seen improvements. For example, when someone has a poor opening we give them tips on how to improve and within the next round of mystery shopping you can see an improvement in their opening.
We’ve also seen an improvement in the way we build rapport with customers and gather intelligence throughout a call, which has resulted in our sales agents discovering the best appliances for our customers’ needs in a timely manner.
Online shopping is full of curveballs as the customer is unable to see the product face to face, so being able to handle custom queries and objections is a key aspect of what we need our teams to do. Mystery shopping has certainly improved this area of our work as well.
What would you say to other businesses who are considering working with Human Experience?
Definitely go for it! Human Experience has helped us to identify issues within our call centre and the feedback has helped our team and our service improve. It’s great for training and coaching purposes and we are so glad we decided to do this.
