Have you ever walked into a store or dined at a restaurant and wondered if the service you received was up to par? What if there was a way to not only voice your opinions but also get paid for it? Enter mystery shopping, a unique and intriguing way for everyday consumers to become undercover evaluators of businesses. In this blog post, we’ll delve into what mystery shopping is all about, how it works, and why it’s become increasingly popular.
What is Mystery Shopping?
Mystery shopping, also known as secret shopping or undercover evaluation, is a market research technique used by businesses to assess the quality of their products and services from a customer’s perspective. Essentially, mystery shoppers are hired to visit stores, restaurants, banks, hotels, and various other businesses posing as regular customers. Their mission? To evaluate everything from the cleanliness of the premises to the friendliness of the staff and the overall customer experience.
How Does Mystery Shopping Work?
So, how does one become a mystery shopper? It’s relatively simple. Mystery shopping companies, also known as agencies, recruit individuals from diverse backgrounds who are willing to evaluate businesses anonymously. These individuals, or mystery shoppers, are then assigned specific tasks, such as making a purchase, asking questions, or simply observing the surroundings.
Once the assignment is completed, mystery shoppers submit detailed reports to the mystery shopping agency, highlighting their observations, interactions with staff, and overall experience. These reports are then used by businesses to identify areas for improvement, reward exceptional employees, and enhance the overall customer experience.
Why is Mystery Shopping Popular?
Mystery shopping has gained popularity for several reasons. Firstly, it provides businesses with valuable insights into their operations from a customer’s perspective. By understanding what works and what doesn’t, businesses can make informed decisions to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Secondly, mystery shopping offers everyday consumers the opportunity to earn extra income while shopping or dining out. It allows them to have a voice in shaping the quality of products and services they receive while getting compensated for their time and effort.
Conclusion
In conclusion, mystery shopping is a win-win for both businesses and consumers. It allows businesses to gain valuable feedback to improve their operations, while also providing consumers with an opportunity to earn extra income and influence the quality of products and services they receive. So, the next time you walk into a store or grab a bite to eat, remember that there may be a mystery shopper in your midst, working undercover to ensure you have the best possible experience.
In today’s cutthroat business landscape, companies face intense competition and ever-increasing customer expectations. To gain a competitive edge, businesses must prioritise delivering exceptional customer experiences. This is where mystery shopping comes into play. Mystery shopping, a method of evaluating customer interactions through anonymous shoppers, has become an indispensable tool for organisations looking to understand their customers better, identify areas for improvement and stay ahead of the competition.
In this blog post, we will explore the importance of mystery shopping in today’s competitive market and how it can drive business success.
Customer Experience Differentiation: In a sea of competitors, businesses must find ways to stand out and differentiate themselves. Exceptional customer experiences have become a key differentiator in the market. Mystery shopping provides organisations with unbiased feedback on various aspects of the customer journey, including service quality, staff performance and overall satisfaction. By uncovering gaps and areas for improvement, businesses can take proactive measures to enhance their customer experience, exceed expectations and create a positive brand perception that sets them apart from their rivals.
Identifying Operational Strengths and Weaknesses: Mystery shopping allows businesses to evaluate their operational strengths and weaknesses from a customer’s perspective. By analysing mystery shopping reports, companies can identify specific areas where they excel and leverage those strengths to their advantage. Similarly, it enables them to pinpoint weaknesses and address them promptly. Whether it’s improving employee training, refining processes, or optimising product displays, mystery shopping provides actionable insights that drive operational excellence and continuous improvement.
Monitoring and Maintaining Consistency: Consistency is vital for building trust and loyalty among customers. Inconsistent experiences can lead to customer dissatisfaction and a negative impact on brand reputation. Mystery shopping plays a crucial role in monitoring and maintaining consistency across multiple locations or touchpoints. By regularly evaluating different outlets, departments, or even online channels, businesses can ensure that their brand standards are upheld consistently. This level of consistency builds trust, fosters loyalty and gives businesses an edge in an increasingly competitive market.
Competitor Benchmarking: Staying ahead of the competition requires a deep understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. Mystery shopping allows businesses to benchmark their performance against their competitors. By deploying mystery shoppers to evaluate rival businesses, organisations can gain insights into what their competitors are doing well and identify areas where they can outperform them. This knowledge enables businesses to fine-tune their strategies, differentiate themselves and seize growth opportunities.
Empowering Data-Driven Decision-Making: In today’s data-centric world, making informed decisions is critical for success. Mystery shopping provides businesses with tangible and quantifiable data about customer experiences. This data, combined with other metrics and feedback mechanisms, empowers organisations to make data-driven decisions. By analysing trends, identifying patterns and leveraging insights from mystery shopping reports, businesses can prioritise initiatives, allocate resources effectively and implement targeted improvements that drive customer satisfaction and business growth.
In today’s competitive market, the importance of mystery shopping cannot be overstated. It serves as a powerful tool for businesses to understand customer experiences, identify areas for improvement and strategically differentiate themselves in the quest for success.
As companies navigate the challenges of a highly competitive marketplace, mystery shopping offers a way to gain a competitive edge. From understanding customer preferences to fine-tuning operations, monitoring the consistency and benchmarking against rivals, mystery shopping empowers businesses to make informed decisions, enhance the customer experience and foster long-term success. In this dynamic business environment, embracing the power of mystery shopping is no longer an option but a necessity for organisations striving to thrive in today’s competitive market.
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.
Are you interested in becoming a mystery shopper? Do you like a flexible work schedule and are comfortable with a variable income? Some weeks are busier than others. Do you thrive on multitasking and are willing to act out a role at times? All these aspects are part of being a mystery shopper. If you like these challenges, you might find mystery shopping interesting.
Before accepting work as a mystery shopper, research the mystery shopping companies you are interested in, as unfortunately there are some unscrupulous employers. A recognised company will never ask you for start-up fees.
Qualifications And Age
Mystery shoppers sometimes represent a certain type of person or a specific age demographic. The age requirements for jobs are as diverse as the consumers purchasing products or using services. Most assignments, however, do not have specific demographic requirements.
While no formal qualification is needed mystery shoppers require both good written and spoken English, as well as keen observational skills and the capacity to offer valuable feedback. It is crucial to have a grasp of what constitutes excellent customer service and the ability to identify and report on it.
As e-commerce continues to expand and technology increasingly plays a role our daily lives, having a fundamental knowledge of how mobile apps or web-based tools function, or at the very least, a willingness to acquire such knowledge, has become essential.
Experience-Level
Mystery shoppers are expected to have a basic understanding of the subject they are evaluating whether a specific industry, aspects of products and services, or the quality of customer service. To assess a restaurant fairly, you need to have a good idea how restaurants operate. The hotel industry has specific characteristics, and you need to know what the acceptable customer experience standards are within the tourist sector before you can act as a guest and provide quality feedback.
If you love chocolate, that might be the only experience a client wants when you need to observe how customers engage with a brand in the shops, as they don’t need you to know how chocolate is manufactured.
Personal Skills
As a mystery shopper, you will be required to do a variety of assessments, defined by the client’s requirements and the customer journey they want you to test. Here are some personal skills that are good to have if you want to become a mystery shopper.
Detail oriented
Excellent observational skills to see what is not obvious
Active listener to hear what is not said
Curious about the company or product you are evaluating
Flexible enough to work at short notice and unusual hours
Enjoy multitasking
Objective and open-minded
Good memory, as you might not be able to take notes on the job
Willing to act out a role at times
Timeliness
Efficient and concise during reporting.
Proper Reporting Skills
Good verbal and written communication skills are vital to mystery shoppers. You are expected to give an honest assessment of your evaluation in detailed reports to the company that hired you. If you are unable to make notes while you are doing your mystery shopping, work out a system where you can record or write down information as soon as it is completed, as details are important for a successful assessment. Most companies have a particular format for the report to help you turn your experience into meaningful data.
We are a credible company with more than 10,000 experienced and trained field researchers, the largest base in Ireland. For Customer Perceptions, our field researchers are the core of our successful programmes. Are you interested in becoming a mystery shopper? Contact us for more information.
Emma Harte (CEO) and Susan Reilly (Head of Sales and Marketing) were both delighted to attend the Mystery Shopping Professionals Association (MSPA) annual conference in Varna Bulgaria earlier this month. This conference brought together almost 200 Mystery Shopping Companies to work together to share their experiences over the past number of years and also what the future holds for mystery shopping.
The theme of this conference was Assess|Adapt|Act and carried the theme of how we need to assess the current situation for both ourselves and our Clients, adapt to the changing environment and act on the learnings to ensure we are bringing our Clients the most insightful and up-to-date programmes we can.
The conference saw a number of experienced mystery shopping professionals present their stories on challenges they themselves had experienced over the past 2 years and how they adapted their processes in response.
Day 1
First off we had an introduction from the President of MSPA Europe/Africa Luis Duarte who opened up the 2-day conference. Luis spoke to us about the theme of the conference Assess|Adapt|Act and what this meant for Mystery Shopping Professionals. This set the context for the other Speakers that would deliver their findings over the coming 2 days.
First of the presentations was from Cyriel Kortleven, a Global Speaker. Cyriel talked to us about “The Change Mindset”. This was a really impactful presentation which told us the power of using phrasing such as “Yes, and…” instead of “Yes, but…”. Such a simple but strong way to allow us to see the potential in every challenge, and not the pitfalls. Through some group exercises, this message was really hammered home and we all left this session feeling so positive and upbeat. A fantastic opening session to have.
The rest of the morning immersed us in Case Studies delivered by other Mystery Shopping Professionals. One case study delivered by Juliana Goranova from Client X in Bulgaria (our Host country), showed us some unusual mystery shopping programmes such as sending mystery shoppers out to restaurant to take samples of the fin from a certain variety of fish. This was to ensure the restaurants were not serving a protected species of this fish. Juliana also spoke to us about the work they did with Charitable Organisations. This really was food for thought!
Another really interesting case study was presented by Jill Spencer from ReactCX – Money for Old Rope. This presentation was a powerful delivery how of we need to demonstrate to our Clients the return on investment of their programmes. Although this can sometimes be difficult to measure as some of the returns are intangible such as customer loyalty, staff satisfaction etc… Jill showed us some really useful ways of demonstrating ROI by working with our clients to gather the data we need to show this. This is something we have definitely taken on board and are working away on at the minute for our existing and potential clients.
The afternoon session on Day 1 saw us being divided into 3 different breakout sessions (depending on the colour of MSPA baseball cap we received). I attended the Proposition Zone and Emma attended the Global Zone. These breakout sessions were a good way to work with other Mystery Shopping Professionals to examine each of the themes and really discuss what the challenges/solutions were. One thing for certain in the Proposition Zone was that data is crucial to business and is becoming more and more the backbone of how businesses operate and grow. We chatted about exactly how we should be collecting data for our Clients, exactly what data we need to collect and what the future looks like here. The importance of Exploratory Workshops with our Clients pre-commencement of the programme is an important factor here.
Day 1 ended with some fantastic networking opportiunites for all Participants and a lovely dinner in the International Casino and Hotel restaurant, and lots of lovely Bulgarian wine.
Day 2
After having a lovely dinner and networking event the previous night, Participants were buzzing on day 2 for what the day ahead holds with their new found friends/partnerships. The day was opened again by Luis Duarte – President of MSPA who recapped on what we had learned the day before.
We then listened to Tony Allens presentation of some fantastic new intuitive hardware that can actually check the age of shoppers in a store. He had the machines with him and demonstrated exactly how this worked. This seems like a fantastic tool for companies to streamline their age verification checks in-store. This was really an eye-opener on how technology is evolving for all aspects of business. If anyone would like more information on this hardware, please contact me on susan.reilly@customerperceptions.ie and I can get you more information.
Another really interesting presentation came from Hannah Weekes of ProInsight. Hannah’s presentation was titled “The Modern Mystery Shopper – Creating Brand Loyalty/Obsession”. This insightful session showed us the power of not only connecting with our Mystery Shoppers but Engaging them to the point where you are creating an obsession with your brand. It is so beneficial for us as a Company, but also for our Mystery Shoppers to feel part of an engaging community. We took lots of learnings home from this session. Thank you Hannah!
Finally, to wrap up the session Andy Firth, from Ipsos UK spoke to the group about how the world is changing so rapidly and what can we expect next. Andy’s insights were a perfect opportunity to encompass all we had learned in the past 2 days and really summarise where we were now, and how we need to be prepared for what is to come next. The good news was that there is so much opportunity for mystery shopping, regardless of how the world changes and it is up to us as Mystery Shopping Professionals to anticipate these changes and adapt our businesses to continue delivering powerful and impactful programmes to our Clients.
After a hugely interesting 2 days, we wrapped up with an amazing traditional Bulgarian dinner on the Beach with some super entertainment. We heard stories of Bulgarian history, listened to some traditional music, watched some traditional dancing and even got to see two wonderful people demonstrate Bulgarians ritual of firewalking! As conferences go, we have to say that the Bulgarian hospitality for the duration of our trip was outstanding. Such a wonderful place to visit. Even with the extremely sore heads on Friday morning, we were sorry to be leaving such a beautiful city.
Well done to all at the MSPA for organising such a fantastic experience for its members!
Customer Perceptions, having been in existence for almost a quarter of a century now, have completed over one million customer satisfaction/feedback assessments in this time.
What does having one million pieces of feedback mean? It means we can pull together some fairly robust statistics as to exactly what your customer wants.
One thing for sure is, times have changed, whilst 10 years ago, the primary focus for customers was a “good price”, this has dramatically changed since. Customers are now much more complex when it comes to the decisions they make. Below you will find the key drivers resulting in higher satisfaction levels and ultimately higher spend and likelihood for repeat business.
1.) Feelings.
It might be unusual that we talk about feelings when it comes to your customer, however feelings matter. Fact! Customers want to feel loved, to feel wanted, to feel important, to feel valued. Take a minute to make your customer “feel” special. The more feelings a customer can attach to a store, the more memorable the event, hence the more likely they are to return.
2.) Time.
Time is key to customers, and everybody has less and less each day. Nobody wants to “waste” time. Queues are the single most annoyance when it comes to shopping. A queue will deter a customer before they even fully step into your store. You have no chance if your stores have long queues. We need to be ahead of the game, ensuring we are utilising every tool in our reach to minimise the time spent queuing and waiting. Efficiency is key.
3.) Knowledge.
Customers hate bluffers. They can spot them a mile off. Don’t put staff in front of customers if you have not trained them in fully on the products. This does your reputation considerable damage. Staff need to be confident in what they are selling, and also need to be confident in saying “I don’t know, but let me get the answer for you”.
4.) Promises.
Empty promises are a pet peeve for customers. Don’t tell your customer that you will give them a call in 2 days time if you have no intention of doing so. If you commit to something, you must deliver. Have a robust system for recording when following up calls must be made and stick to it. The system should be transparent so any staff member can pick up the calls if needed.
5.) Answer Me!
How many times have you felt like screaming this down the phone, or to your laptop screen when you just want somebody to answer your question. Customers want to talk to you, and they want to talk to you through a variety of channels. Keep the lines of communication open at all times. If you have a phone number listed on your website, then answer the call when it comes through. If you have an email address listed on your website, then answer the email when it comes through. If you have a facebook page, then answer your messages….. see where I am going with this? If you list a channel for your customers to communicate with you, then you absolutely must have this channel manned in a timely manner, i.e. within a 24 hour period max.
Make sure to follow our Linked In page, and check out our blog section on our website regularly as we will be telling you exactly how to achieve each of these points in much more detail.
Our first tutorial on making the Customer FEEL good, is coming soon…………….
Mystery shopping can offer an endless range of unimaginable insights. So, before you come to the conclusion that mystery shopping provides limited information, let’s take a look at some of the more unique projects we have carried out.
Aside from the more regular convenience store visits, hotel stays and finance calls, we have an array of past projects that we are sure will intrigue you.
We have sent the underaged demographic to shops to buy cigarettes to see if staff are checking for ID and we have sent people to funeral homes pretending they have had a bereavement to assess the empathy of staff. Some have been sent to visit the cliffs, some have made video consultations with the doctor for the contraceptive pill, cold/flu and back pain. We have assessed photo machines in shopping centres, assessed charity collectors on the street and even travelled on the ferry to price the products on the boat. To make things even MORE exciting, we have challenged people to the adventure rooms and got them to break the rules, sent them on thrilling theme park rides and sightseeing adventures across land and sea.
Not only can the scenarios be wonderfully weird but the profile of the lucky individual undertaking the assessment can be requested and we will make it our mission to meet the specifics. We have sent ladies with a bigger bust to lingerie stores to try on bras and to get seriously specific, we have used a shopper over 50 with a stigmatism in one eye, no history of heart disease and a prescription more than plus 5 on their lens to test an optician.
We are always willing to take on new challenges, things we have never done before in an aim to provide our clients with the essential information they need to grow and strive.
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