s ISOs and merchant level salespeople (MLSs), you are always on the lookout for unique, creative ways to improve customer service. But have you considered the benefits of mystery shopping? It is one way to identify growth opportunities and stimulate innovation.

Such do-it-yourself research can help you find a marketing edge. It gives you the chance to monitor your merchants' operations - from their perspective. It can also help you study merchants' tendencies and find new relationship-building avenues.

Identifying unique sales and service opportunities is crucial for any ISO or MLS. Success in doing so improves your service to merchant customers, enabling you to capture a greater market share.

Outside advantages

In establishing mystery shopping programs, some ISOs remove internal bias by hiring outsiders; they often employ mystery shopping services. A quality mystery shopper conducts unscheduled merchant visits in the guise of shopping, interviews merchant providers without revealing your ISO's identity, tabulates the results and reports on key findings.

One typical mystery shopper mission is to enter a merchant's establishment and locate areas that show potential for further growth with that merchant account, such as opportunities for self-checkout or contactless payments.

Before starting a mystery shopping program, understand what your merchant customers want from you and what you can accomplish through such a program. For example, suppose one of your merchants sells swimming pools.

Mystery shoppers can't help your ISO build sales long-term if a merchant's product quality is poor. And they can't tell you what your merchant target market wants from your business or products.

However, they can help ensure that people who come to that merchant's store for swimming pool products are waited on promptly and courteously and that the sales information is presented consistently. So, identify what the merchant needs and build a sales and training program that satisfies them.

Live retail visits

There is truly no substitute for live merchant visits to ensure that you remain in sync with your customers. Study your merchants' pitfalls, learn the key drivers of their businesses and eliminate emotion when deciphering their needs. Getting the most out of merchant visits requires having clearly defined objectives and understanding what matters most to your customers and your business.

For example, an ISO might send a mystery shopper to its restaurant merchants in order to compare prices, types of credit card transactions taking place, hours and days of the week when credit card usage tends to spike, and merchant friendliness to customers using credit cards - not to mention whether patrons are up-sold or cross-sold complementary services.

With a good mystery shopper program, you experience your merchants' product offering the way their customers do. Then you apply what you learn to training your sales agents to plus-sell to your merchant portfolio.

Whatever type of mystery shopping services you decide to use, your program will be most effective if mystery shoppers arrive at merchant locations unannounced, study merchant product and service offerings, walk and talk like actual retail credit card-using customers, and have years of experience in asking merchants pointed questions.

Lower-cost telephone approach

Telephone mystery shopping is another way to gather information. It can help ensure that your customer-service levels are up to snuff and merchant inquiries are addressed and rectified swiftly. Similar to on-site mystery shoppers, telephone mystery shoppers gather valuable information about merchant business models and the performance of your ISO's sales and customer service employees.

Telephone mystery shopping is a highly reliable way to gauge the quality of customer services over the phone. Think about this. If you or someone else from your ISO called merchants directly to gather research information, you or your staff might be recognized. And merchants might be influenced, resulting in biased or censored data.

However, through a mystery shopper, you can be more assured that surveys will be carried out in a professional fashion. This will lead to accurate, useful information. A quality mystery shopper partner is trained to conduct a large sample of calls, gauge specific responses, and study data in more scientific ways than perhaps your own, untrained, biased employees could.

Mystery shopping your ISO

You can also use mystery shopping inside your own ISO. Because poor sales procedures and inadequate customer service lead to lost sales opportunities, consider hiring a mystery shopper to evaluate the experience your ISO offers to customers. It can be an early warning system for a business that relies on extensive merchant contact and relationship building.

Professional mystery shoppers, posing as potential merchant customers, make inquiries of your ISO. Then they provide you with evaluations of their experiences. A successful mystery shopping program can analyze and measure the product knowledge and skills of your sales agents.

Remember, a visit from a mystery shopper is a snapshot in time. The more often you shop, the more you start to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your merchant customers.

Being armed with such knowledge puts your ISO in a powerful position to help you and your merchant customers anticipate problems in advance. This goes a long way toward relationship building. And strong relationships drive add-on business and thus increased revenues.

For help in putting your own mystery shopping program together, visit www.quirks.comThere you can search more than 250 mystery shopping service providers. In addition, you can find an extensive database of reputable mystery shopper resources by contacting the Mystery Shopping Providers Association or visiting their Web site at www.mysteryshop.org

Mike Grossman is the Executive Vice President of Sales for Cynergy Data, a merchant acquirer that distinguishes itself by relying on creativity and technology to maximize service. Cynergy offers its ISOs: Vimas, cutting edge back-office management software; Vimas Tracking, a ticketing system that makes responses to customers fast, accurate and efficient; Brand Central Station, a Web site of free marketing tools; plus state-of-the-art training, products, services and value-added programs, all designed to take its ISO partners from where they are to where they want to be. For more information on Cynergy, e-mail Mike Grossman at mikeg@cynergydata.net