In simple words, we can understand mystery shopping as a mechanism, wherein a person visits a retail store with the objective of measuring the customer experience quality. Many brands and organizations have detailed processes and parameters to ensure that consumers have a good experience in their sales locations. Some examples include –
- How consumers are greeted
- What is the maximum acceptable waiting time
- How many products are at display and more
Mystery shopping has multitude of benefits for retail stores, which include –
- Monitoring and measuring service performance of employees
- Bolstering customer retention
- Improving overall efficiency
- Monitoring facility conditions
- Supporting promotional programs
- Competitor research
- Identifying the scope for employee training
- Ensuring stellar product or service delivery
- Enforcing employee integrity and knowledge
- Facilitating positive customer relationships
- Serving as a motivational tool to customers and more
Among the array of benefits that mystery shopping offers, the acceleration of improved customer experience stands out. How can mystery shopping facilitate CX? Let us find out!
The Role of Mystery Shopping in Customer Experience
In 2023, creating customer experience (CX) strategies in boardrooms and conference halls is not enough. The hour’s need is to put them into practice, which is an entirely different process altogether. Customer experience, especially the on-site or retail experience is becoming incredibly important. In many cases, it is the on-site experience that determines if the customer will make a purchase or return to the store again.
Moreover, retail experience is the biggest attestation of a brand’s identity and prowess. So, ensuring that the ‘de jure’ strategies of customer experience can be transformed into ‘de facto’ requires extra efforts. In such a context, mystery shopping and mystery shoppers come into the picture.
The crux of mystery shopping is that a person (mystery shopper) goes undercover as a customer to see what the retail experience is really like. The shopper can check on a number of in-store factors, such as cleanliness, organization, friendliness, humidity of the employees, store layout, and more. Mystery shopping, thus, measures or quantifies observable traits and behaviors of a brand that contribute to customer perception and experience.
The key point to remember is that there is nothing that sets the mystery shopper apart from other customers, so their employees treat them the same as everyone else. After visiting the store, the mystery shopper compiles their notes and observations. In typical cases, the brand also assigns certain tasks for the mystery shopper to complete or to observe.
Now that we have touched upon the nitty-gritty of mystery shopping, let us delve further into the topic.
How Does Mystery Shopping Improve Customer Experience
A Mystery shopping provider (MSP) can manage shopper programs from start to finish. It includes creating a survey with questions tailored to your brand, sourcing shoppers, reviewing completed surveys, and analyzing the consequent reports to discover areas of improvement.
The key to a successful mystery shopping program is dynamism. No good mystery shopping program should remain static. In addition, the retail surveys must not receive consistently high scores, as no business is perfect all the time. To prevent biases and skewed data from creeping up, the brand must get in touch with a range of mystery shoppers to ensure that varying viewpoints are acclimated in the process, and the questionnaire is adjusted on a regular basis to gauge customer pain points.
Using Mystery Shopping Data to Improve Customer Experience
Customer feedback methods, such as surveys, or focus groups, often act as report cards. Your company can see the scores but it might be difficult to have any concrete and valuable idea of what in-store behaviors are galvanizing those scores, and how they can be improved. For instance, executives might be of the opinion that high turnover rates can be solved by lowering prices, but the crux could be that the target clientele wants more personalized services. Thus, mystery shoppers and mystery shopping data breaks the iron wall that exists between surveys, customers, and retail, and provides an open and continuous chain of communication for better CX.
Wrapping It Up
So, there we have it, a crisp overview of how mystery shopping can bolster customer experience for brands and retailers. Mystery shopping works best when it is operated in tandem with other tools like social media, reputation management, surveys, etc.
