I, too, feel like mystery shopping of dealers (while potentially insightful) isn't the best method to learn of pitfalls in the lead process. While Jon's article discusses the importance of phone scoring (and coaching those scored calls, which I fully agree with), the same must be done for Internet leads. I am not concerned with the occasional OEM shops (though, admittedly, I don't think they focus on the right criteria always, nor do they have intuitive people completing said shops on their behalf). I'm also am not opposed to ownership at a dealership dropping a monthly shop into his own system and seeing his team's follow-up through the eyes of a customer.
However, I am generally opposed to mystery shopping stores because it
A) Doesn't give an entire picture because of a small sample size
B) It makes the team less productive by spending time seeking content with someone that has no intention of buying
This is why we at DealerKnows created TaskTeacher, our
lead process grading technology and team. Our trained agents become the watchful eye in the dealership, and like Steve Stauning recommended, monitors the lifecycle of a lead for the first 10 - 20 days. However, we do it on real live leads that already exist. (We could always go longer, but I'm sure Steve would agree that the majority of contact attempts stop after 7 days anyway. CDK Global just shared similar data from a study at DSPC). Moreover, it isn't enough to grade how ISMs/BDC Agents are handling leads. They're provided detailed coaching comments on what they did right or wrong, if there were misspellings, the full email/call/text attempt chain involved, and we send this information back to, not just the lead handlers, but the owners/operators/managers too.
If you're looking to evaluate a lead process - or individuals on your team - it cannot be a once a month snapshot. Each lead handler should have leads spot-checked multiple times each month, it must be consistent, it must be shared as it happens with management (to save deals), and you must be able to monitor trend lines long term to ensure there is growth from each agent. Again, it must be on LIVE leads. Not fake shops that devalue the ISMs' time. Mystery shopping can slow productivity, force over-analyzation of leads, cause cherry-picking, and disenfranchise your team. Doing it on live leads, with scientific criteria, sent to multiple roles in the store, from a trained eye, is the only way to leverage lead process data with actionable information to improve your follow-up efforts. Just my $0.02.
