When we discuss mystery shopping, we usually do so from the standpoint of how it can directly benefit your business’s customer experience. We emphasize the importance of using the perspectives of regular consumers to gauge your customer service, sales, and support processes from a layperson’s point-of-view. Mystery shoppers observe everything from cleanliness to merchandising, and they give you the kind of feedback only an external viewpoint can provide, all of which helps you and your managers grasp the big picture.
Competitive Mystery Shopping
There’s another dimension to mystery shopping that’s nearly just as valuable, and that’s its ability to provide what we call competitive intelligence. To accomplish this, we audit both your locations and your competitors’ so that you can directly compare how your company measures up to theirs. To do this, we send the same mystery shopper to two or more locations without telling him or her who our client really is, and we provide the same exact survey for both businesses. At the very end of these audits, we ask the shopper to compare and give an honest opinion about which was best and why.
Learning from Your Competitors
Beyond the customer experience, competitive mystery shopping permits you to understand how your competitors are positioning their products and services to their customers. A good example can be found in Lynne Moore’s article on this very subject in which she, as the CEO of a national senior living and healthcare consultancy, describes how she advises her clients to use mystery shopping to learn from other senior care facilities.
As Moore explains, “Savvy marketing personnel are working hard to communicate a unique market position for their communities in a way that clearly communicates the benefits of what they have to offer and how their operating philosophy is different and better than other communities. Mystery shopping the competition will provide the information and ammunition needed to develop your strategy and fine tune your sales and marketing program. You can be sure your competitors are doing the same.”
When to Zig, When to Zag
Inevitably, your competitors are going to do some things better than your company, and some things worse. The idea of competitive mystery shopping is, of course, to learn from their triumphs and failures so that your business can avoid having to go through all the pains of trying every idea out, one by one.
Moreover, this competitive intelligence can inspire how you position your products, as Moore explained above regarding your marketing. For example, if you operate a hot tub store, you might find that your competitors are really stressing the therapeutic benefits of their products. Mystery shopper feedback might reveal that this particular sales strategy isn’t as engaging as it used to be, and that the new winning tactic is to stress how these products provide a social benefit: that is, how they can be used to allow busy families and friends to gather and reconnect with each other.
Mystery shoppers are able to provide that feedback quickly and directly, so you don’t have to wait months or even years to measure a trend through sales figures. And this feedback works for every industry, from restaurants to retail stores.
Your Next Step
Whether you’re already a client of The Brandt Group, or you’ve been considering becoming one, we can help you with leveraging the advantages of competitive intelligence anytime you’re ready. Ready to plan your next great quarter—and beyond? Let’s get started!
