We offer a unique and effective approach to mystery shopping. We combine a customer-based shopping process with a highly-automated reporting system to identify performance trends throughout your organization. With our mystery shopping program, you can:

• Accurately assess performance from the customer's perspective.
• Assess behaviors by individual, department, location and system-wide.
• Produce long-term improvements in sales and service behaviors.
• Ensure conformance to established performance standards.
• Effectively focus management efforts.
• Compare individual location results to industry standards.
• Receive proactive consultation on improving performance from CSP experts.

Once initiated, our mystery shopping program begins paying off immediately through improved customer satisfaction, higher customer retention rates, greater sales motivation and increased new business.

Customer-Based. By utilizing customers instead of contract shoppers, our mystery shopping program delivers several advantages: (1) evaluations are based on routine visits, simplifying logistics (thereby reducing costs); (2) evaluations can reach into every service area, including loan servicing and commercial services; (3) evaluations deliver data based on real, not contrived transactions, making the information more valuable and (4) evaluations include data that is very specific and highly actionable.

Dedicated Client Services Team. When you choose Customer Service Profiles, a dedicated client services team will plan and manage every aspect of your mystery shopping program:

• Training of Branch Managers.
• Design and implementation of process.
• Recruitment of customer evaluators.
• Training and management of customer evaluators.
• Performance management support for your organization.
• Program administration.
• Reporting and consultation.

Flexible to your needs and cost-effective, our mystery shopping program can become a great resource for measuring and improving customer service.

Post-episodic surveys gather information from customers after they have completed financial transactions such as deposits, transfers, etc., or visits with a personal banker such as opening a new account, etc. They can also focus on certain departments such as mortgage loans, consumer loans, etc., where customer service is just as important but customer contact may not be as frequent. Surveys can be conducted by phone within 24 to 48 hours of the transaction or completed within a few weeks, if mailed. Post-episodic surveys are valuable when you want to:

• Measure improvement in customer service.
• Develop further insight into the needs and expectations of your customers.
• Evaluate customer service at every possible contact point.
• Identify top performers.
• Identify best practices.
• Receive proactive consultation of results.
• Receive training recommendations.
• Assess difficult areas to reach such as consumer loans, mortgages, etc.

We can quickly and cost-effectively implement a customer-based, post-episodic survey program for your financial institution, customizing all elements to your needs and providing complete program administration and management support.

A benchmarking study gives you just what its name promises: a benchmark, a measurement of your customer service expectations. We conduct benchmarking studies by phone or mail to answer these key questions:

• Are customers satisfied with your quality of service?
• What are customers pleased with?
• What are customers unhappy about?
• What service behaviors do your customers value?
• How do customers compare you to other financial institutions?

We manage your study from beginning to end. We provide complete statistical analysis, consultation and recommendations on important "next steps" for improving customer satisfaction.

We also offer follow-up benchmarking studies to measure changes in customer satisfaction and to quantify progress towards important milestones - by department, location and throughout the organization.

Benchmarking studies are helpful because:

• They give you information regarding your customers' overall satisfaction with your services and products.
• They give you the information you need to set performance goals.
• They give the tool you need to measure annual improvements towards those goals.
• They give you insight for new products to meet your customers'needs.
• They offer you the opportunity to see how well your customers think you
  are performing compared to your competitors.
  

Opened and closed account research studies can play an important role in refining your customer service performance. These research studies can help you discover where and why you are gaining or losing customers. Opened and closed account research studies, conducted by telephone, can help you answer these and other vital questions:

• Why do customers choose to open or close an account with your bank?
• What are the crucial factors?
• Are those factors within your control?

Statistical analysis is fully integrated into both opened and closed account research studies. This analysis helps you identify and focus on customer service factors that are important to your customers. It helps make sure that your customer satisfaction program concentrates on areas of opportunity, where improvement in customer satisfaction will help you acquire and retain customers.

Competitive studies consider the entire consumer marketplace, both your customers and those of your competitors. It generates results which represent consumer behaviors, share data, perceptions, awareness positioning, advertising visibility, brand strength and preferences. In a nutshell, our competitive studies pinpoint where you stand in the competitive environment in the minds of consumers. A typical study addresses the following important issues:

• What is the awareness positioning of your institution compared to competitors?
• What type of market share do you control for selected financial products; where are you relatively strong and where are you relatively weak?
• Are you defined by the consumer marketplace with any attributes that make you special or that differentiate you from competitors?
• What type of customer loyalty do you possess compared to key competitors?
• Are your customers more or less loyal; do they plan to stay with you and / or recommend you to others?
• Are your advertising messages heard, read or seen and what impact do they have?
• If consumers were to consider another institution, how many would preference you 1st, 2nd or 3rd and why or why not?
• What is most important to consumers in considering a financial institution?

Competitive studies are conducted by telephone within a defined area or areas of interest. Calling is completed from state-of-the-art calling centers by trained research interviewers. Deliverables include complete cross tabular results, which serve as a reference document and a summary report providing graphs and charts highlighting key findings and with commentary to provide possible interpretations for planning and decision making.