What is Mystery Shopping?

Mystery Shopping is a valuable tool for measuring and providing a deeper understanding of the customer experience. Through engaging frontline colleagues, providing supportive feedback and actionable insight, it can lead to a real step change for a business and ultimately improvements in the customer experience.

Mystery Shopping can:

• Tell you what is happening at every customer touchpoint e.g.
  • Face to face
  • Telephone
  • Online e.g., Live Chat, a customer’s journey through a website, or when ordering/applying for products
• Measure employee performance against an agreed framework, e.g.
  • Regulatory standards
  • Accurately communicating promotions
  • Adhering to service standards
• Tell you how colleagues are engaging with customers, e.g., whether they are being friendly and proactive, link-selling and closing sales
• Be an effective and positive communication tool to help motivate front-line employees to continuously improve
• Demonstrate to both customers and employees that the ‘customer’ is front and centre within your organisation

Usually, Mystery Shoppers provide feedback though a questionnaire. Audio and video footage can also be used, either on its own or in conjunction with a questionnaire. This will depend on what is being assessed and what best suits the needs of each business.

There are a range of ways to measure the customer experience, with Mystery Shopping being one tool that both Insight & Operational Teams can utilise to better understand and improve the customer experience. Voice of Customer and Customer Satisfaction surveys help to identify what the customer wants or feels, but Mystery Shopping tells you what has actually happened, and provides objective and robust feedback that can be used to understand where there are opportunities to make improvements.

To find out how you can use and benefit from Mystery Shopping, please get in touch via the details below.

Danielle Sones Experience Director danielle@aba.co.uk / 0161 431 1221