Boost Your Brand’s Customer Experience with Mystery Shopping: Here’s how!

A brand’s success is often determined by how consistent it is and how it keeps up with its promise. The retail industry is seeing an increase in competition, and the technology allows your consumers to get all the information they need about your brand right in a single tap. Thus, your brand’s reputation and customer satisfaction must be high.

But, it is a difficult task because you cannot measure them. So, how to measure if your brand’s strategies are getting executed in all the stores of your brand? One thing that can help you gauge this is the mystery shopping customer experience. It ensures your brand is keeping up with its standard efficiently. If you want to know more about mystery shopping and how it can help your brand, continue reading further!

What Is Mystery Shopping?

Mystery shopping is a practice that helps you understand the experience of customers with your brand. You can also call it field-based research made by independent auditors called mystery shoppers who pretend to be customers. They visit any branch of your brand and gather information about the quality of products and service delivery.

It allows them to get an objective opinion of your brand since they pose as customers. A mystery shopper has a list of criteria that you compile for them. It gives you a chance to evaluate the mystery shipper’s customer experience at the branch of your brand, service delivery and the professionalism of employees working for your brand.

Purchasing in your store, ordering your brand’s products online or asking inquiries to customer support via different channels such as telephone, e-mail or in person can be a part of mystery shopping. Once the mystery shopper makes the test purchase or request, you can summarise their impressions.

Mystery shopping is also your opportunity to get your service or offer evaluated by a relevant target group. Your employees must be unaware of these ongoing tests if you want to get a realistic picture.

Various Forms of Mystery Shopping

The simplest forms of mystery shopping are in-store or online purchases. Here’s everything the mystery shoppers can tell you about while their auditing:

• How quickly could they find a specific product?
• How is the presentation in the store?
• How do they perceive your website?
• How was their overall shopping experience?
• What impression does your online store or shop give?
• Is the product range perceived as substandard or high quality?
• Are the products arranged sensibly and attractively?

Another form of mystery shopping that you can try is:

• Vouchers in newspaper inserts or apps
• Customer loyalty programs
• AI or Chabot-based customer guidance systems for your stores or website

This third way of mystery shopping helps you check delivery times and returns management. Here’s everything the mystery shopper can tell you about while their auditing:

• How long did the delivery take?
• When did they receive the order & shipping confirmation?
• Did they receive the information about shipping and ordering at all?
• How long does it take until your company picks the return?
• Were they well-informed at every step?
• Did the communication lack any information they expected?
• Was the process of returning a product simple?

This last way helps you test your brand’s customer service. It can be a form of inquiry or a fictitious complaint. You instruct the test customers to ask questions via a specific channel or in person. Once you get this information, you can compare the ideal image and the real-time to retrain your employees if necessary.

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Most brands entrust mystery shopping to mystery audit companies like V5 Global or specialized agencies. Here’s how you know mystery shopping is for your brand:

• If it is growing and you feel you do not have enough resources at hand to conduct proper research
• If it is too large and has branches across the world

Mystery audit companies or shopping agencies help you in:

• Finding an experienced person who can match your needs and become the mystery shopper you need.
• Making a detailed briefing for mystery shoppers on:
  1. What and how should everything be in the store?
  2. How is the cleanliness of the floors?
  3. What is the location of the goods on the shelves?

The detailed briefing also consists of instructions on

• How should the sellers behave?
• How should sellers be dressed?
• What should the seller say?

The instructions vary and depend on your brand’s niche, preferences, and desired result, but they can be as specific as you want, for example:

• The seller must offer them a competent consultation and 2-3 products to choose from
• The cashier must say hello
• Offer a specific package
• Pack milk, bread, and fruit in separate packets on their own

There are many benefits of mystery shopping for customer experience. Here is how mystery shopping can help your brand:

• It allows you to assess your brand’s customer service to understand its strong and weak sides.
• The results of the mystery shopping show:
  1. Professional skills of your employees
  2. The attitude of your employees towards customers
  3. The amount of knowledge your employees have about the product or service
  4. Whether your employees follow the standards set by your brand or not
• The professionalism of your employees has a direct influence on the satisfaction of your customers and sales. Hence, using mystery shopping to enhance customer satisfaction makes sense too. It helps you do the course corrections necessary while training your employees.
• It can also be applied to evaluate your competitors, the quality of their products, and service delivery quality. You can use these results for benchmarking and comparisons.
• It helps you check your brand’s offline and online service quality and compare it to your quality standards.
• It gives you objective feedback as the mystery shoppers describe their impressions in detail.
• It helps you get information on crucial data points regarding your brand’s delivery and return processes. It enables you to improve customer satisfaction and gain loyal customers in the long run. When expectations and reality are in harmony, it is natural your customers will customers keep coming back to you.
• While your employees are attending the mystery shopper you sent, here are a few things you need to remember:
• The testers must correspond to your customers. It will ensure that results are not distorted. After all, you do not make changes based on false assumptions, right?
• Prepare for the execution of this project carefully to ensure you do not spend too much time and money to get results that are not helpful.
• Make sure employees who are a part of this test do not notice anything about it, and do not confront them with the results in a way they lose their confidence.
• Do not expect your employees to take care of your real customer because they will be tied up taking care of a mystery shopper you.

Once you have planned your mystery shopping project and have the following details at hand:

• Which areas do you need to test, and to what extent?
• What are crucial evaluation criteria for you?

The next part is finding suitable mystery shoppers for the project. The answer to this depends on the complexity of your product and testing requirements. The demands on your mystery shoppers increase as complexity increases.

Here’s everything you need to remember while finding mystery shoppers:

• They need to correspond to your target group as they would find it difficult to assess your brand or service. Also, the employee helping them may be taken aback immediately.
• They need to be thoroughly trained and embody their role because, in the case of personal consultation, they cannot work their way along a script. They must be able to answer your staff’s queries individually and quickly in case of doubt.

Make sure you do a follow-up on the test along with the mystery shoppers, and do not disregard appropriate remuneration to them. These seem minor factors, and the success of any mystery shopping project depends on them partially. The mystery shoppers you choose and the associated effort are the sticking points for the successful implementation of your mystery shopping project.

The Bottom Line

Mystery shopping can provide crucial information about your brand, but be careful with its result. Bad results may not always be due to the fault of your employees. It can also be your inattentiveness towards the training process you set for your employees.

It is a great way to match your ideas with the reality for the customer if you want to achieve a consistent customer experience aligned with your goals and values. You can also seek support from mystery audit companies like V5 Global that have experience implementing or organising mystery shopping projects.

The success of any mystery shopping project in some way does depend on the test buyers. Hence, when you select mystery shoppers, choose from your relevant target group. You will receive relevant results only if you execute the mystery shopping test professionally.