Mystery shopping has become an increasingly popular tool for businesses to evaluate their customer experience. By posing as ordinary customers, mystery shoppers provide invaluable feedback to businesses about their strengths and weaknesses. In this article, we’ll explore the best tips for using mystery shopping to enhance customer experience.
Briefing The Mystery Shopping Team
1. One of the most important things to keep in mind is that the mystery shoppers should be provided with a detailed and documented brief about the task that they have to perform. This will provide the professionals with a reference point of what actually needs to be done. The document also contains other details such as relevant guidelines and procedures to follow while performing the mystery shopping research.
2. If possible, one must also include any photographs or pictorials that can illustrate the journey that these shoppers have to go through. It helps a lot if the shoppers are able to properly visualize the entire journey that they need to follow so that there is a similar flow to every process.
3. Apart from that, the team of mystery shoppers needs to be provided with any necessary items, props, or materials that they are going to need during their visit. Some common examples include documents, cash for making purchases, samples, etc. Suppose, if they need to choose a specific pair of pants for a certain shirt, make sure that they are provided with a sample pair, to begin with.
4. It is important to keep in mind that all the mystery shoppers need to be briefed at the same time and businesses should ensure that the message is exactly the same. This is to make sure that the information that is being provided to the mystery shopping provider team is all consistent and similar.
5. A part of briefing the team also includes role-play. This process ensures that the mystery shoppers are able to understand what they need to do. Practice makes perfect, right? So, proper practicing and role-play are definitely essential to ensure the success of the program.
Ensure That You Choose The Best Mystery Shoppers
It is important to ensure that your mystery shoppers receive appropriate training before they are sent to conduct mystery shopping assignments. Mystery shopping involves a more nuanced understanding and interpretation of emotions, and thus, it may not be productive to use mystery shoppers who are only familiar with quantitative mystery shopping experiences, which typically involve a very structured format centred around a product, placement, or merchandising.
These mystery shoppers may not possess the necessary skills to interpret the emotional engagement of the customer, which is crucial in a mystery shopping exercise. Therefore, it is important to choose the right individuals who have the required training and skills to interpret and report on the emotional engagement of the customer.
Selecting the right mystery shopper for the job is vital in ensuring that the insights gathered from the exercise are accurate and actionable. It is important to choose individuals who have exposure and experience that enables them to relate to the product or service being evaluated. For example, if you are conducting mystery shopping for restaurants, it would be counterproductive to select a mystery shopper who does not visit restaurants and doesn’t have experience in the field.
Such a mystery shopper may need help understanding the dynamics of the restaurant, and may not be able to act out the role with credibility. In such instances, training or exposing the mystery shopper to similar instances or experiences may be necessary to ensure that they can carry out the assignment with the required credibility and insight. Ultimately, choosing the right mystery shopper is critical to obtaining valuable insights that can help drive business growth and customer satisfaction.
What to Do After Getting The Evaluation Reports?
Once the mystery audit process is completed, the shoppers will then present the data to the company and then the ball is in their court. Just having the data is simply not enough. Companies will then have to analyze the data and gather some actionable insights. Performance reviews, product quality, customer service quality, and other factors should be considered when making the changes. With the help of these mystery shopping techniques, companies will be able to provide customers with exactly what they want.
