Many people come across the concept of mystery shopping and wonder exactly what it is and when they do find out they are fascinated by it and the fact that almost all major companies especially in the consumer sector use it very frequently.
Mystery shopping is whereby companies promoting their products or services to the consumer (and this is increasingly happening online now) want to know how they are seen and experienced from the buyers’ point of view. So, agencies like ours carefully select and train freelancers who are then sent to the clients’ premises such as bank branches or car showrooms to gauge the level of customer service offered and to check on awareness of the product benefits by the sales staff as examples.
The process can be as simple as ticking a few boxes by the mystery shopper to see if they were offered the service properly i.e. greeted politely and attended to promptly to how the representative dealt with the questions posed by the ‘customer’. There are more complicated experiences that can also be set up and emulate real life purchasing cycle for example ordering items to be delivered and seeing how long that takes and how the delivery staff responded apart from the sale person who sold the original product or we can have the mystery shopper go through a loan application process at a bank in another more immersed mystery shopping event.
It is possible to literally mystery shop almost all types of experiences and interactions but there is a need for the independent agency working on behalf of the client to know how to set this up properly , identify the points to be tested correctly , run a pilot and keep checking the mystery shoppers do what they are supposed to do, only then the final analysis can have that credibility. From the clients’ side it is much better to have a bench mark of what they want to achieve, this is usually done by inhouse training and by monitoring the results pre training and post training, there is usually a positive difference and a tool like mystery shopping can validate that. Many companies would then base their employee rewards system on these results like the employee of the month award or ‘spot’ bonuses etc.
As mentioned, mystery shopping now has extended to the online world to include client websites. apps and all the social media used, many of our daily experiences and perception about products and services are now formed entirely online. Get to know more about our mystery shopping services by sending us a message or call.
