Why Mystery Shopping is a Key Tool for the Retail Industry

Why Mystery Shopping is a Key Tool for the Retail Industry

By Susan Reilly – Head of Sales and Marketing

The key to success in today’s competitive market is having a solid grasp of your customers. With the help of trained shoppers known as mystery shoppers, mystery shopping evaluates the customer experience and offers valuable insights into your customers’ shopping trips. These fictitious customers observe and assess pre-defined areas of a customer’s shopping trip, including customer service, product quality, and overall experience. You can improve your customer experience by identifying strengths and weaknesses in your customer journey with mystery shopping, which gives you a unique consumer perspective.

It Contributes to Your Analysis of Your Competitors

You must be thoroughly aware of your rivals’ advantages and disadvantages if you want to stay one step ahead of them. An efficient tool for competitor analysis is mystery shopping. You can learn important information about your competitors’ customer experience, pricing strategy, product positioning, and marketing communications etc by hiring mystery shoppers to assess their stores. Using this data, you can evaluate your performance and spot opportunities to set yourself apart from the competition.

Are Your Internal Processes Being Followed? 

Through mystery shopping, you can assess compliance with internal processes and gain insights into your company’s customer-facing operations. Your staff’s compliance with company policies and procedures can be evaluated by mystery shoppers, assuring uniformity and high standards across all sites. Mystery shopping enables you to apply the required training and modifications, resulting in a more effective and efficient operation by discovering areas for improvement in internal processes.

It Enhances and Advances Your Brand

Building customer loyalty and gaining new customers depend on having a great brand image. You can evaluate how effectively your brand is marketed in store by using mystery shopping. To maintain a consistent brand message and a favourable brand experience, mystery shoppers can review a variety of touchpoints, including point of sale signage, marketing materials, and interactions with staff. Mystery shopping assists you in enhancing your brand’s reputation and developing a consistent customer experience across all channels by pointing out potential improvement areas.

Utilising Mystery Shopping as Part of Your Marketing Plan

Knowing the advantages of mystery shopping, and selecting the best partner to carry out this insightful customer experience analysis is critical. Many companies also want a tool that allows customers to give direct feedback (and also avoid unwanted negative reviews about their brand). Through their TellUsFirst platform, Customer Perceptions provides a comprehensive feedback service. Customers can leave real-time feedback on their experiences with Customer Perceptions’ instant customer feedback system, enabling you to continuously improve your services and customer experience. 

To best serve your needs, Customer Perceptions offers various mystery shopping services, including in-store, telephone, internet analysis, and competition analysis. As a primary marketing tool, mystery shopping offers improved customer insight, contributes to competitor analysis, shows how to improve internal processes, and strengthens and builds your brand. You can acquire a competitive edge, boost customer satisfaction, and promote company expansion by including mystery shopping in your marketing plan. To make the most of mystery shopping and advance your marketing efforts, contact Customer Perceptions immediately.

Visit Customer Perceptions to learn more about the company and its market research services.

5 Reasons Why Mystery Shopping Is A Key Marketing Tool

5 reasons why mystery shopping is a key marketing tool

Mystery shopping, a technique that involves sending anonymous evaluators to assess the customer experience, has become an increasingly important tool in modern marketing. With the ability to provide valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of a business, it offers a unique perspective that traditional market research methods cannot match. 

In this article, we will explore five reasons why mystery shopping is a vital marketing tool, from identifying areas for improvement to enhancing customer loyalty and driving revenue growth.

You Gain Better Customer Insight 

Mystery shopping is a valuable tool businesses use to gain better customer insight. This process involves hiring trained professionals to pose as regular customers and evaluate the customer experience at various touchpoints of a business. By doing so, businesses can gain insights into how customers perceive their products or services, how they interact with their staff, and what factors influence their purchasing decisions. These insights can help businesses identify areas for improvement in their customer service, products, or marketing strategies, leading to a better overall shopping experience. Mystery shopping can also provide businesses with valuable feedback that they can use to refine their sales approach and build stronger customer relationships.

It Forms Part Of Your Competitor Analysis

Mystery shopping can be a powerful tool in conducting competitor analysis. By sending a mystery shopper to a competitor’s business, companies can gain valuable insights into their operations, customer service, and overall customer experience. This information can be used to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the competition and to benchmark against their own operations. Additionally, companies can gather information on competitor pricing strategies, product offerings, and promotional tactics, which can inform their own business strategies. Mystery shopping can help companies stay ahead of the competition by identifying areas where they can improve and capitalize on opportunities to differentiate themselves in the marketplace.

You Can Learn About Internal Procedures 

Mystery shopping is a great way to learn about internal procedures within a company. By posing as regular customers, mystery shoppers can evaluate how well employees adhere to company policies, such as customer service standards, sales procedures, and handling customer complaints. This can help companies identify areas where they need to improve internal procedures and can ultimately lead to better customer experiences.

Create And Evaluate Products Based On Valuable Research

Mystery shopping can also be a valuable tool for creating and evaluating products. By using mystery shoppers to evaluate competitor products and services, companies can gain insights into what works well and what doesn’t. This information can then be used to inform product development and marketing strategies. Additionally, mystery shopping can help companies evaluate the effectiveness of their own products and services, identifying areas where they may need to make improvements to better meet the needs of their customers.

It Promotes And Improves Your Brand

By ensuring that your employees deliver consistent and high-quality customer experiences, you can build a positive reputation for your brand. Mystery shopping can also help companies identify areas where they need to improve their customer service or product offerings, allowing them to better meet the needs of their customers. By consistently delivering exceptional customer experiences, you can build customer loyalty, increase customer retention, and ultimately drive more revenue for your business.

Looking for a market research solutions provider?
Look no further than Customer Perceptions!

Our services are designed to improve customer experience, provide competitor insights, boost customer retention, monitor industry standards, and ultimately increase sales and revenue.

We operate globally, serving clients in Ireland, the UK, and beyond. 

Contact us today to learn more about how you can leverage mystery shopping as a marketing tool.  

Common Mystery Shopping Mistakes To Avoid

Common Mystery Shopping Mistakes To Avoid

After nearly three decades in the industry, we know what the mystery shopping mistakes are that frustrate our clients. People often think Mystery Shopping intends to catch employees out when they make mistakes. Each client has a different purpose when using our Mystery shopping services. It might be to measure customer service quality, confirm whether employees are complying with company policies and regulations, gather specific information about services and products, or any other need identified by the business.      

At Customer Perceptions, we work in partnership with our clients to design programmes tailored to their individual needs.  Consultation is the first stage of our Mystery Shop process, where we meet with the client to discuss their objectives, pain points, and what they want to achieve. Then we provide our clients with a more detailed overview of how the process works, project timelines, costing and any other matters that need to be discussed. 

From here our teams are briefed and receive detailed guidelines that give insight into the client’s business, the objective of the programme, what scenario to follow, what to report on and more. 

The following are common mistakes we attempt to avoid:

Not Specific Enough   

Sometimes businesses complain that the Mystery Shop does not keep the audience in mind or cover enough of the shopping experience for the results to matter. They feel the process and content are not specific enough. Besides consulting in detail with our clients before drafting the questionnaire, we also do quality checks once the reports from our mystery shoppers are submitted. Did our shoppers assess the correct location and report on every element of the customer journey?

Clear Objectives

It is vital that the objectives of the mystery shopping programme are clear. Every business wants a return on investment when they use Mystery Shopping to measure customer experience.          

We prioritise your objectives and core values, while using our experience and expertise to design the survey for the mystery shopping programme. Our goal is for the questionnaire to address each touchpoint of the shopper experience and assess lasting impressions. 

Not Acting Like A Normal Customer   

It is sometimes difficult for mystery shoppers to act like normal customers, especially when they are instructed to shop in a certain order, but it’s not impossible to overcome. A particular level of experience is required when someone wants to become a mystery shopper. Most people have experience in retail shopping and can act out a defined role as required. As with every industry, restaurants and hotels have set service and quality standards. A mystery shop in these industries requires someone with experience in the field so they can behave like an average patron or guest.    

We recruit the ideal candidate for your mystery shopping programme and draft exact guidelines for them to follow. Then we brief them by giving them insight into the business, the objectives of the programme and what is required of them. It includes what to look out for, the scenario to follow, what to report on, and timelines.  

Forgetting The Toilets

Remembering to review the toilets during a mystery shopping session is about giving attention to details. Many business managers and owners know that customers unconsciously associate the cleanliness of a shop’s bathroom with the standards of the business and how they view their customers. A clean bathroom creates a positive perception showing that a company is committed to all stages of the customer service experience to ensure customer satisfaction.   

We make the reports, results and analysis available on our user-friendly online system, Client Insights. Here you can drill down to individual locations or particular dates to source the information you specifically need.       

At Customer Perceptions, we are specialists in creating bespoke market research solutions for our clients. We limit mystery shopping mistakes with our comprehensive Mystery Shop process. Contact us today.

Things To Consider When Choosing A Mystery Shopping Company

Choosing a mystery shopping company

Hiring an undercover shopper is a great way to assess whether your business meets or exceeds your expectations and provides the right quality of products and services for your target market. Mystery shopping companies can conduct secret shop audits on your behalf to help you understand how your employees work, and how your business is performing in relation to the goals and standards you have set for it. The question is, how do you go about choosing a mystery shopper that can conduct an incisive audit and provide you with the data you need to perfect your business? Here are three points you should consider as you look for a mystery shopping company. 

Must Have The Experience and Knowledge

If your mystery shopping experience is going to be successful, it must be conducted by a provider with plenty of experience. They should be able to present you with successful case studies that demonstrate their experience. Ask as many questions as you need to about their previous jobs and satisfied clients. They should have plenty of customer testimonials to prove that they can do what they claim to be able to do. Take note of how they answer your questions and the kinds of recommendations and observations they make. These will quickly make it clear how well they understand your requirements and what needs to be done to meet them. 

Should Have a Process For Choosing Mystery Shoppers

The company you end up hiring should have exceptionally high standards when it comes to selecting their mystery shoppers. Ask them how they go about picking their shoppers. They should have a systematic process, together with a set of rigorous criteria, which they use to select only the best and most appropriate shoppers for your business. For example, some companies run a certification system that involves asking their potential shoppers a set of questions. The shoppers need to be able to provide satisfactory answers to all of these questions in order to be recruited. 

Should Have a Robust Feedback System

Mystery shopping providers must be able to provide quality data that you can use to action significant improvements in your business. They should present valuable and detailed reports that clearly explain their findings and make tangible recommendations. The best providers run a program with a dashboard that showcases the outcome, which helps you examine all data clearly and effectively, especially if you monitor multiple shopping locations. Their reporting and feedback system should allow you to review the report based on your KPIs, compare performances over time and across different locations, receive real-time data and set new goals.

Customer Perceptions are leaders in market research solutions. With 27 years of experience, we have developed bespoke research solutions to help our clients to enhance their customer experience, gain insight into their competitors, increase customer retention, monitor standards and ultimately, increase sales and revenue. Mystery shopping is one of the services we offer to help businesses assess their performance as merchants or service providers. If you are currently choosing a mystery shopping provider, contact us and ask us about our services.

The Different Types of Mystery Shopping Explained

mysteryshopping

The use of a mystery shopping program in your business is a fantastic way to evaluate how your company operates, from customer service to employee performance. Also known as secret shopping, mystery shopping is a market research tool used to identify problem areas in your business and improve customer loyalty. 

A professional shopper (usually an independent contractor from a mystery shopping agency) will pretend to be an average customer and evaluate the quality of service they receive. The entire process is done anonymously by trained professionals, so no one will know who the mystery shopper is. Therefore, businesses will be provided with professional, unbiased feedback on whether their strategies are working and any problem areas so they can be rectified. 

In-Person Mystery Shops

In-person mystery shopping is the most common type of mystery shopping service used by businesses. As a part of this service, a mystery shopper will anonymously visit a business pretending to be a regular customer and evaluate the business performance and customer journey following a predetermined set of guidelines. 

With in-person mystery shopping, the goal is to conduct the evaluation without raising suspicion from the staff in order to obtain the most accurate information possible. If the staff aren’t aware that someone is evaluating them, they are more likely to act how they would on a daily basis. The secret shopper will have an all-around experience of the customer journey in your store. The visit can vary in length depending on the type of indicators, mystery shopping purpose, or the type of evaluated sphere. 

In-person mystery shopping is most commonly used by retail stores, the hospitality industry, restaurants, and financial institutions. 

Phone Call Mystery Shops

Next on the list is Phone Call Mystery Shopping. Just as audits of performance and customer experience should be conducted in-store, monitoring the telephonic performance of your employees is just as important. Phone Call Mystery Shopping is especially useful for companies that utilise call centres or where customers can receive service telephonically. 

The mystery shopper will call your company to assess the level of service they receive. During the call, the secret shopper will determine the following points (among others) to determine the performance of your business telephonically: 

  • Is it easy or difficult to contact your business?
  • How long did it take for the phone to be answered?
  • The employee’s greeting.
  • The employee’s competence and product knowledge.
  • The employee’s telephone manner and professionalism.
  • The employee’s willingness to help.
  • Whether the customer’s problem was solved on the call or not. 

Typical telephone mystery shops include everything from completing remote transactions to simply asking for additional information. Phone-based mystery shopping is most commonly used by businesses in the following industries: Hospitality, travel, call centres, communication, consulting, insurance, sales, financial services, communication, and healthcare. 

Website Mystery Shops

A strong online presence is crucial to the success of your business in the digital age. Most people carry their phones everywhere, search for businesses nearby, and look at online reviews that can either make or break your business image. In addition, the evolution of e-commerce and e-business has made mystery shopping just as important for online retailers as it is for on-site establishments. 

Website Mystery Shops, also known as virtual mystery shops or internet mystery shopping, see the secret shopper engage with your business online. The secret shopper will assess how responsive your business is online, whether your website is easy to navigate, your employee’s competencies and product knowledge, and how your employees interact with customers on social media and through the website. 

This type of mystery shopping is most commonly used by businesses in the following sectors: e-commerce, travel, insurance, automotive, real estate, and telecommunications. 

Hybrid Mystery Shops

Also referred to as multiple touchpoints or mixed-type mystery shopping, the hybrid service is typically used by larger businesses that need several mystery shopping evaluations. Using in-person, telephonic, and online mystery shoppers ensures you have accurate information and actionable insights into all aspects of your business. 

Hybrid mystery shopping is a fantastic way to assess the entire customer journey across all spheres of your business to better understand the customer’s overall experience from start to finish. 

The type of mystery shopping that best suits your business is dependent on your industry and business model, but if you need help choosing a mystery shopping service that offers the most benefit for your specific needs, contact Customer Perceptions today.

How Mystery Shopping Can Benefit Your Business

How mystery shopping can benefit your business

From the outside looking in, one may think that the more customers a company has, the higher its profits. However, this is not necessarily the case. Anyone with retail experience will tell you that building a network of loyal, repeat customers is the cornerstone to the success of your business. 

Suppose your customer service, staff performance, or customer experience is not up to par. In that case, customers won’t return to your business, word of mouth will spread, and you will eventually lose income. As a business owner or executive, rectifying any problem areas in how your business is run can only be done after the problems have been identified. This is where mystery shopping programs come in. 

Many businesses, especially in the retail and hospitality industries, aim to identify problem areas in their business performance by using mystery shopping agencies. Mystery shopping is a process whereby an independent person is hired, through an agency, to masquerade as a customer and perform an evaluation of your business to determine customer satisfaction and service quality. The hired mystery shopper will be an anonymous consumer and have no connection to you or any of your staff. This is to ensure that all reports remain unbiased. 

The mystery shoppers will visit your business and rate their experience in an unbiased, professional, and thorough manner. They will complete a detailed report of the entire customer journey to their superiors, who will share the information with you so you will be aware of how customers perceive your company’s service and their experience as a whole. 

Here are some of the benefits of hiring a mystery shopper to evaluate your business: 

Get Valuable Feedback from a Customer’s Perspective

Mystery shoppers are trained professionals, so when they visit your business as a customer, they will take note of every aspect of the customer journey from start to finish. No matter how big or small an issue may be, it will be noted. This is a lot more effective than waiting for reports from your management or waiting until an actual customer brings forward a complaint. 

This attention to detail and knowledge of the retail sector will help your business pinpoint specific areas for improvement that may have been flying under the radar. When you know how your customer experience, satisfaction, and brand perception are seen from a customer’s point of view, you can make the necessary changes to improve customer retention. Not only can this improve your customer loyalty, but the improvement in your business image can attract new customers.  

Gives You Insight Into Staff Performance and Internal Procedures

Even if your employees are fully proficient in the business’s Standard Operating Procedures (SOP), sometimes the top-down approach to company standards and procedures still doesn’t have the desired effect at a store level. Even if your management department provides reports on business operations and staff behaviour, personal biases may hinder their ability to see problem areas (whether intentional or not).

The unbiased perspective of a professional shopper can provide you with actionable insights into your employee integrity and whether your operational procedures are working. Not only will this show you areas where further training or action may be needed, but the mystery shopper can also give you the following valuable insights: 

  • Are your current operational procedures working at a store level?
  • How do your employees handle customer complaints?
  • Are your sales representatives selling actively or passively?
  • Does your staff have relevant product knowledge?
  • Did your team acknowledge the customer when they walked in? (Smiling, greeting, or offering help; Or was the customer ignored?) 
  • Are employees presentable and abiding by the company dress code, if there is one?
  • How do employees act when there isn’t a manager around? 
  • Are legal requirements and professional standards being met?
  • Are your staff members on their cellphones in front of customers? 
  • Suggestions and recommendations for improvement. 

Valuable Research into Your Competitors 

Competitiveness is rife in the retail industry. If you know how your competition performs, what they’re doing, their business values, how they treat their customers, or how their layout works, you can see where you rank in comparison and how to improve. This will provide you with the competitive advantage your store may need to provide better customer service and put your store steps above your competitors. 

Mystery shopping combines qualitative and quantitative market research, using professionals trained to evaluate an experience in a storefront environment. This doesn’t just help businesses like retail stores, but any company that offers some level of customer service. Contact Customer Perceptions today if you are located in Ireland or the UK and want to know more about mystery shopping or other ways you can improve your business performance.