Mystery Shopping
At ABa, we deliver tailored mystery shopping services designed to help businesses measure, understand, and improve their customer experience at the frontline.
From in-person visits to our clients' customer-facing facilities, as well as telephone, email and online interactions, our coordinated programmes involve hand-picked Mystery Shoppers who operate with discretion and professionalism across the UK.
As experienced mystery shopping providers with over 35 years in the industry, we've worked with organisations of all sizes across different sectors. We offer mystery shopping for:
- Financial Services
- Retail
- Leisure
- Hospitality
Our Mystery Shoppers are well-briefed on each client's specific standards, guidelines, language and service culture. Their mission is to capture real insight into each customer experience, how service quality is being delivered and maintained, how regulation is being complied with or gather specific information about products/promotions. And because they're Mystery Shoppers, of course, their identity and purpose aren't revealed to any establishment or staff member, and our teams are highly skilled in ensuring they remain 'mystery'!
Why Choose ABa as Your Mystery Shopping Provider?
We've been doing Mystery Shopping since 1990, so we know better than most what works and what doesn't.
What makes us different?
- Smaller, highly skilled teams. Where most organisations use large teams, we typically choose to use smaller teams of people carefully selected for their skills and experience and fit with the client's demographics where needed.
- Consistent communication and cooperation. Just as we work in partnership with our clients, we work very closely with our Mystery Shoppers to ensure real consistency of behaviour, evaluation and alignment with clients' standards. The exceptionally high levels of communication we have with our Mystery Shoppers pay dividends in the delivery of clean data and detailed commentary to help every end user understand and improve the customer experience. This is often missed out by others who use larger teams of less highly trained people.
- Reliable delivery. We complete every planned visit on time, every time. (It sounds obvious, but we know it often doesn't happen.)
- End-to-end support. While we offer all types of Mystery Shopping, we specialise in designing complete programmes that don't just measure performance but actively help frontline teams to deliver.
Types of Mystery Shopping
We work with each one of our clients to build a Mystery Shopping programme that meets their core business objectives.
However, broadly there are three types of Mystery Shopping programmes.
This is usually the mystery shopping programme our clients within regulated industries like financial services and automotive go for. This programme ensures that your frontline teams are meeting all required compliance standards.
Regulatory compliance is particularly important for financial service organisations, building societies, financial advisors and mortgage brokers. The financial sector faces heightened regulatory scrutiny, particularly concerning the FCA's New Consumer Duty, which requires firms to proactively address customer vulnerabilities and ensure that their customers obtain genuinely good outcomes.
Due to strict measurement, these programmes often involve our in-house Tech Team developing bespoke, secure and interactive compliance grading sites and the use (and transcription) of material from sophisticated audio/visual recording systems.
Our Promotional Mystery Shopping focuses on the specific compliance around a product or service. Our mystery shoppers will assess whether specific marketing campaigns or product promotions are being executed correctly. This ensures your brand messaging and promotional strategies are being communicated and followed to the letter across all touchpoints.
What does ABa Mystery Shopping deliver?
Methods of Mystery Shopping
The evolution of business practices and technological advancements has led to the development of various types of mystery shopping, each tailored to evaluate specific aspects of the customer journey.
At ABa, we offer a full suite of delivery methods, allowing us to carry out comprehensive mystery shop programmes across all channels, regardless of the industry.
In-person mystery shopping involves a mystery shopper physically visiting a business location. As established mystery shopping UK specialists, we have a UK-wide network of professional Mystery Shoppers who carry out in-person visits, assessing everything from greetings and service standards to product knowledge and compliance. We also make the best use of our trusted partners within the Mystery Shopping Professionals Association (MSPA) to extend our reach across the globe.
We conduct mystery shop online evaluations to assess website usability, navigation, the accuracy of the information, and overall online user experience. From product ordering to delivery and returns, our custom-built surveys are designed to uncover friction points and drive improvement.
Our bespoke questionnaires are designed to understand the details of user experiences to a precise degree. This allows us to measure performance and service and drive improvement in website usability and online customer journey.
This type of mystery shopping programme evaluates the responsiveness and quality of digital communications, whether through web chat, email, or social platforms. We use smart technology to track interactions, measure KPIs, and report back with insightful, structured data.
Our fantastic Tech Team continuously modifies, designs, and innovates to provide us with the most up-to-date methods for capturing, evaluating, and reporting on service standards. We build each programme to best fit the individual make-up of our clients' Contact Centre, utilising tools that we have specifically built for the job.
- In house recording booths
- Remote dial-in and recording facility, allowing ABa Mystery Shoppers to complete calls from anywhere within the UK (and abroad)
- Remote dial-in and auto-record of real customer calls (in line with GDPR / Data Protection Act 2018)
- Two-way recording for both outgoing and incoming calls, including callbacks
Our video mystery shopping services use industry-approved equipment to deliver high-quality footage of real customer interactions. The footage is reviewed, edited and published via bespoke web portals, which can host an array of different features to enhance usability, such as
- Compliance grading sites
- Playlist creation to facilitate feedback and coaching
- Add custom markers for easy identification of highlights within the interaction
An effective and budget-friendly alternative to video, our audio mystery shopping records conversations discreetly. We have a suite of audio recording devices that we make available to our UK-wide Mystery Customer network. Each recording can be shared via a custom-built web portal and published alongside a complementary Mystery Customer report or a full word-for-word transcription. To make it easier for everyone, we've even built an interactive transcription-to-audio link, allowing end users to click on a word and be taken to the corresponding part of the recording.
Audio recording is a great alternative to using video. Although it is cheaper, it still allows you to capture verbatim what was said during the customer interaction.
The Real Value of Mystery Shopping
Mystery Shopping tells you what's really happening in your frontline environments and measures employee performance against an agreed framework. It's designed for frontline staff engagement to help you achieve one of the hardest tasks in CX – culture change – as well as service improvement.