Mystery Shopping: developing effective strategy

A Mystery shopping programme consists of telephone calls and or visits to more or less any type of outlet, establishment or institution.

There are thousands of businesses across the UK, such as supermarkets, department stores, restaurants, beauty salons, motor dealerships and amusement parks who use mystery shoppers to monitor customer service. We use carefully selected mystery shoppers to go into your place of business and appear as normal customers to evaluate the quality of service.

We can help you find out how fast customers get served, how clean your store is, how friendly your employees are: you name it, we can measure it.

Mystery Shopper programmes are a good way to recognize the need for training in a certain area. Our surveys are customized to fit your needs. We check to see if everyone is following your employee handbook. We use your input along with any employee training materials that your company uses.

Quite simply the key is to make the shopper campaign reflect reality as closely as possible. This elicits better responses and the resulting feedback is more valuable in real situations. It also prevents staff from trying to 'spot' a mystery shop in progress. Therefore, the scenario is important, and depends upon the objectives of the programme.

Routine enquiries and purchases are clearly more straightforward both to set up and to measure, but variations make it less easy for operators to 'spot' a mystery shopper.

Before contacting us, you might like to look through the following checklists. They may help focus your objectives. It will certainly help us to explain how we can help to do so.

Some Typical Mystery Shop Scenarios:

• Responding to promotional campaigns
• Initial enquiries for product prices and stock availability or service costs and lead times
• Buying or ordering products
• Booking appointments for services offered
• Information provided by or complaints dealt with by Customer Services / Customer Relations

Setting Up Mystery Shops

Once you decide to proceed with the mystery shop programme, the basis for assessment will be established. This effectively creates the framework for an ‘evaluation sheet’ for each mystery shop call or visit made or received.

These evaluation sheets can be stand-alone or can subsequently be used to generate tailor-made analytical and/or narrative reports/graphs. In either case, they are prepared to help you achieve the desired objective(s) of the mystery shop initiative.

If outlet staff members are mystery shopped on a periodic basis, this of course provides a means of monitoring, measuring, analysing and possibly even incentivising improvements in their call handling/sales technique over time.

Constructive suggestions and recommendations can be dovetailed into the reports if so desired. Initially it is probably best to keep the calls or visits relatively straightforward, for both political and practical reasons.

This also gives you a chance to gauge their effectiveness in terms of improved staff performance, not only in the mystery shop scores, but of course ultimately on sales levels. This also ensures that your marketing expenditure is controlled from the outset.

Ask for a quotation and we think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Continue to: Telephone Mystery Shops