Mystery Shopping
Mystery Shopping is the practice of using trained shoppers to anonymously evaluate customer service, operations, employee integrity, merchandising, and product quality and knowledge
When location, pricing, and product assortment are no longer unique, service is often the key to success or failure. It costs 10 times more to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. One unhappy customer will tell 5 other people of their bad experience with your service
What Are The Benefits of a Mystery Shopping Program?
- Monitors and measures service performance
- Improves customer retention
- Makes employees aware of what is important in serving customers
- Reinforces positive employee/management actions with incentive-based reward systems
- Provides feedback from front line operations
- Monitors facility conditions - asset protection
- Ensures product/service delivery quality.
Supports promotional programs- Audits pricing & merchandising compliance
- Allows for competitive analyses
- Compliments marketing research data
- Identifies training needs and sales opportunities
- Educational tool for training & development
- Ensures positive customer relationships on the front line
- Enforces employee integrity.
Who Uses Mystery Shopping?
Hotels, Restaurants, Movie Theatres, Recreation Parks, Transportation systems, Fitness/health centers, Property management firms, Freight/courier services, And many more.
Others
Banks, Retailers, Manufacturers, Call Centers, E-Commerce services, Government agencies, Hospitals, Associations, Franchise operations, and Promotions agencies
How is Mystery Shopping Different From any other Research?
- Mystery shopping is a “cousin” to marketing research (related, but not the same)
- Mystery shopping is typically more operational in nature than marketing research and is most often used for training and incentive purposes
- Marketing research involves determining real customer and prospect opinions, perceptions, needs, and wants
- Mystery shopping fills in a gap of information between operations and marketing.
- Mystery shoppers are not real customers - they know what to evaluate before entering the store
- they may not typically visit the store they are evaluating
- Mystery shopping should not be used alone to determine customer satisfaction, it can compliment, but not replace, satisfaction research
- Mystery shopping is not predictive of every customer’s experience unless sufficient samples are taken and data analyzed in aggregate.