What is Mystery Shopping?
Mystery Shopping is a powerful market research tool used by businesses to assess and improve the overall customer experience. Engaging frontline colleagues, supportive feedback, and actionable insights can lead to real change for a business and, ultimately, improvements in the overall service quality.
A wide range of industries benefit from mystery shopping work, including:
- Retail and e-commerce
- Hospitality and tourism
- Banking and financial services
- Automotive
- Healthcare providers
- Call centres and customer service departments
Many businesses partner with specialist mystery shopping companies to carry out these assessments.
In this blog, we’ll explore how mystery shopping works and its benefits for businesses.
What Does Mystery Shopping Involve?
Mystery shopping usually involves sending a “secret shopper” to visit businesses, interact with staff, and evaluate the quality of customer service, employee behaviour, and adherence to company standards. It consists of real-time, undercover evaluations carried out by individuals briefed beforehand, called mystery shoppers, who pose as regular customers.
While traditional mystery shopping involves visiting a shop in person, modern mystery shopping assignments may take place on a variety of platforms. These secret shoppers can undertake mystery shopping assignments at various customer touch points, such as:
- Face-to-face in physical retail stores or service locations
- Telephone to assess customer service over the phone
- Online, including Live Chat experiences, customers’ journey through a website, and the ease of ordering or applying for products
During these assignments, mystery shoppers analyse and assess things like product knowledge, communication skills, store cleanliness, and whether promotions are accurately communicated. Mystery shoppers have great attention to detail, which is key in delivering a thorough shopping report that helps businesses identify areas of improvement.
The Advantages of Mystery Shopping
Mystery shopping is a valuable market research tool that not only measures and provides a deeper understanding of the customer experience but also identifies key areas for improvement. Here’s how businesses can benefit from mystery shopping:
- Measures employee performance against agreed frameworks such as regulatory compliance and service standards
- Provides an objective and honest view: Mystery shoppers offer feedback free from internal biases, providing a genuine customer’s perspective.
- Offers insight into how staff engage with customers, e.g., whether they are being friendly and proactive, link-selling and closing sales
- Acts as a motivational tool to encourage continuous improvement among frontline employees
- Demonstrates a company-wide commitment to enhancing customer satisfaction and putting the customer first
Unlike traditional customer satisfaction surveys, which reflect how customers feel, mystery shopping tells you what actually happened during an interaction. A mystery shopper acts as a typical customer; however, unlike a regular customer, their evaluation is grounded in objectivity, free from the emotional bias of personal experiences. This provides more objective, actionable data that Insight and Operational Teams can use to implement meaningful changes.
How Does Mystery Shopping Work?
A mystery shopping agency, like ABa, offers a range of assessments to their field-team. After accepting an assignment, the mystery shopper visits or interacts with the business, performing specific tasks while remaining anonymous. Typically, the next step requires the mystery shopper to provide feedback through a detailed questionnaire. Depending on the nature of the assessment, audio or video footage may also be collected to support the report. This flexible approach ensures that each mystery shopping job is tailored to the unique needs and goals of the business.
Enhancing Customer Experience with Mystery Shopping
After collecting comprehensive mystery shopper data, you can leverage these insights to drive targeted improvements and develop informed business strategies. By understanding what’s really happening on the ground, you can:
- Train staff more effectively
- Improve internal processes
- Improve service consistency across all channels and locations
- Boost your overall brand reputation on social media and review platforms
- Increase customer loyalty
In short, mystery shopping provides a goldmine of real-time insights to help you implement measurable improvements in customer service and satisfaction.
Final Thoughts
Mystery Shopping is an effective tool to help you meet and exceed customer expectations by providing an objective lens into your actual customer experience.
Mystery Shopping can be used as a standalone measure or can sit alongside your other CX measurement tools, such as Voice of Customer and Customer Satisfaction surveys. While the latter helps identify what customers want or feel, mystery shopping reveals what actually happened, providing objective and robust feedback for identifying improvement opportunities.
Find out how you can benefit from Mystery Shopping today. Get in touch via the details below.
