Mystery Shopping: How Can It Improve Your Business?
Have you heard of a mystery shopping service? The best way to ensure you’re delivering high-quality, customer-centric service is to see your business from a customer’s point of view. Mystery shopping is a tool that mirrors consumer behaviour to measure your overall business performance.
How does mystery shopping differ from getting feedback from your customers? While mystery shoppers would act like actual customers to evaluate your business, mystery shopping conducts a more intensive assessment and provides a comprehensive report with valuable data and recommendations you can use to build strategies to improve and grow your business.
We’ve listed below some of the top advantages of mystery shopping to your business.
Helps to maintain quality customer service
A mystery shopper will evaluate your staff on how they treat your customers when there is no one supervising them. This will help your business find areas of improvement and action points to maintain or improve customer service satisfaction. This will also help you know what skills or qualities need focus on when providing additional training. Not only will mystery shopping point out inconsistencies and problems, but it will also help to recognise staff members who perform well and exceed expectations. Giving them recognition can result in increased motivation and productivity.
Develops good habits among staff
Let your staff know that a mystery shopper may come in anytime to observe and evaluate the store. Since they would not know who the mystery shopper is and when they might come in, your staff will be on their toes and will always ensure to provide excellent customer service. At first, this might come across as only showing their best when they know someone is observing them. But as a result, this will help them develop good customer service habits that will be automatically part of their routine.
Offers a new perspective
A mystery shopper provides reliable, objective feedback from a neutral perspective. There may be issues in your business that you have not noticed, and the mystery shopping assessment is an opportunity to gain insight into what these issues are and how to fix them. At the same time, an outsider’s perspective can help you gather fresh ideas and look at things from a different point of view.
Evaluates your brand image
To maintain a competitive advantage and become the preferred brand among target customers, you need to convey your brand image, values, and qualities clearly and consistently. Every aspect of your business represents your brand, including your staff, operations, products, services, and facilities. A mystery shopping report will tell you whether or not your business successfully conveys the right brand image you want to communicate.
Provides an insight into the whole customer experience
Mystery shopping will evaluate more than just customer service. You will receive a comprehensive report on the overall performance of your business. This includes the entire shopping experience—the physical condition of the store, cleanliness, tidiness of displays and their presentation, stock availability, quality of sales and service, and compliance with regulations and standards, among many others.
With mystery shopping, you will get invaluable feedback that can impact your whole business. Every business is different, and mystery shopping reports will help you identify specific information, issues, and areas of improvement that are unique to your business.
Get in touch with us at Volumise Consultancy, and let’s talk about how we can personalise our mystery shopping service based on your business needs and goals.
