The True Cost of Complacency and How Mystery Shopping Can Help

by Robert Johnson Blogs on Latest News

What do Kodak, Blackberry, Nokia and Xerox have in common? Each of these companies have been pathfinders in their respective fields. Yet over time they each have rested too long on their past laurels, failing to adapt to a changing world. The overconfidence inspired by past success blinded them to the need for big change. It’s not just with these companies – businesses small and large have to innovate or they run the risk of becoming irrelevant. When complacency, the silent business killer, hits your workplace, you move slowly, become lazy, miss opportunities, forget about your customers, fail to innovate and stop adapting to evolving technologies. On the whole, your company’s performance suffers. It is one of the common pitfalls to your business’ longevity. The quote, “We shall have no better conditions in the future if we are satisfied with all those which we have at present,” clearly explains that comfort breeds complacency. If you’re comfortable with your current state of sales, cash flow and productivity, it means that you’re heading into a state of complacency.

How Does Complacency Affect Businesses?

• You Run a Risk of Non-Compliance.

Banks and financial service organizations of all sizes must adopt an approach to risk and compliance management. It is important to safeguard sensitive data and offer privacy to customer data. Since financial sectors hold a lot of valuable data, they are vulnerable to cyberattacks. One of the worst corporate cybersecurity threats ever in the US was the Equifax data breach that affected over 143 million Americans, 15 million UK customers, and 8,000 Canadian consumers. Poor information security and patch management practices of the company led to the loss of personally identifiable information, with details including social security numbers, home addresses, dates of birth, credit card details and driver’s license numbers. It took Equifax 143 days to discover the data breach and 40 days to notify it to their affected customers. This is an example of compliance failure.

Consumer data protection and fraud prevention are essential to protect your reputation. The credit reporting bureau was unprepared to handle the fallout. In such cases, privacy- and data-protection mystery shopping can assess a company’s ability to comply with data protection principles, allowing them to implement the data subject’s rights. The implementation of a compliance management system can compel technological overhauls. With the right planning and set up, protection of digital assets, improved responsiveness to cyber-attacks, employee training, security controls and regular reviews of authentication can resolve complex issues and deliver value to your business.

• Unmotivated Employees Can Affect Your Business.

Employees who go with the flow or go along with what everybody else is doing, and those who cannot make decisions on their own, can cause severe consequences for business growth. If your employees stop taking risks or pursuing initiatives, stop managing their personal brand, or if they’ve lost their passion for work, it means that they’ve become complacent. Albert Einstein famously said, “Once you stop learning, you start dying.” If your employees don’t constantly learn, they cannot face challenges in the competitive business world. If there is complacency throughout the organization, you must find ways to deal with it. Complacency creates laziness, and employees don’t get the push to try new things for customer satisfaction. Complacency can be the death knell for your business. Ignoring vital warning signs of the changing needs of your workforce can give a chance for your competitors to win the game. In order to survive, forget your past successes and learn how to become focused on innovation. Doing this can help you gear your business up for future challenges.

Mystery shopping companies can help to revert this mentality, helping your employees to be non-complacent once again. Secret shoppers provide statistics about your employee performance and customer perception. They identify teams that may need personal and professional training and recognize employees that are motivated and thinking outside the box. Mystery shopping can improve the overall morale of your workforce. The service also suggests your recruiting team hires passionate employees who can turn new business ideas into profit. When you have employees implementing innovative ideas that keep them actively pursuing excellence, you’re in the game.

• They Forget to Understand Customer Needs.

The brand failure of the new Coke launch was due to their overconfidence based on past success. Its competitor, Pepsi, launched a blind taste challenge and demonstrated that Americans preferred Pepsi over Coke. This led to the introduction of a new formula by Coca-Cola that later turned out to be a classic blunder. With the big launch and money invested in its new product, Coca-Cola failed to understand the public’s emotional attachment to the original Coca-Cola. The new formula was sweeter, like Pepsi, and didn’t go as well as expected, making it one of the worst mistakes the company ever experienced. Branding blunders and aggressive celebrity endorsements negatively impacted the company’s market shares. Failing to listen to customers’ needs, or not caring about the psychological associations built around the brand, along with bad marketing, were the primary reasons for the fall of the new Coke drink.

Understanding Customers Through Mystery Shopping

Coca-Cola failed to understand what made its customers feel so good about buying its drink. If the team focused on customer needs, they could have served their customers in the way they preferred. Mystery shoppers can help you know how your customers view your competition so you can stay ahead of your rivals. If your team is succumbing to complacency, an active mystery shopping program can develop customer personas, identify the customer journey and adapt to customers’ evolving expectations. Mystery shoppers check compliance with your benchmarks for monitoring staff performance and execute new techniques for employee engagement. Mystery shopping helps employees develop new energy in order to spark creative and innovative ideas. This excitement produced can get your employees to stay away from boredom, which is a major hindrance to the success of the organization. You always have to leapfrog yourself. Otherwise, your competitors will grow faster and stronger than you in this fast-moving, hyper-competitive world.

One of the best ways to overcome complacency in business is to do new things regularly and make these things a part of your work culture. Secret shoppers observe the behavior of each staff member for employee productivity. Use this report to adapt a new way of looking at things that leads to innovation needed for overall business sustainability. This strategy can help you quickly resolve new challenges, catch up with technology advancements, resolve unforeseen events, stand out from competitors, increase customer expectations, maximize global connectivity, increase profitability and create a lasting impact.