Mystery shopping can play an important part in helping a company understand its customers. With a greater understanding of its customers, a company can build an honest brand that engages with its employees and customers, and continuously looks at ways to improve the service it offers. Whether this is through better promotions, a wider range of products and services, improved customer service channels, or any of the other wide range of issues that all companies face no matter what industry they are in, mystery shopping is an important tool in the process.
As a company owner you can hire the services of a professional customer experience company, with the skills and the knowledge to gather, collate, analyse and report on your customers to ensure that you have accurate information at your fingertips to help you build your company. It is important though to have an understanding of how mystery shopping works from the other side – as the individual doing the mystery shopping
Mystery shopping is a way for companies to accurately evaluate the standard of service that their customers are receiving. It can target specific physical stores, online checkouts, or telephone customer service teams or all of the above. The size and scope of a mystery shopping programme depends on each company and its requirements.
As the person conducting the mystery shopping on behalf of a brand, you might be asked to enter a store and check the layout, look for certain promotions, check the toilets and see how clean they are, order a product online and go to collect, or call up a company to make a complaint to check on the complaints procedure in place.
A mystery shopper might be paid a low flat fee to conduct the mystery shopping task, but the major benefit is that you’ll have your expenses covered and in a lot of cases get to keep the product or use the service that you are sent to check on. For example, if you are tasked with going to a specific restaurant to see how fast the food is served, you’ll be paid to eat that meal. It means that many mystery shoppers can access things that they might not otherwise have the time or finances to do so.
Mystery shopping can be exciting for those individuals who take it on. It provides an alternative or additional income, as well as access to restaurants, train travel, services and goods that otherwise might not be available to them, all in the name of providing an accurate feedback system for companies to improve their services. If you are the owner of a company and want to gain an insightful look into how your company genuinely operates, hiring the services of a mystery shopping company could provide you with all the accurate information you require. It could lead to sweeping changes within your company or just tweaks to how you currently operate, but it will always provide you with the tools to make things better for your customers and for your company profits as a result.
