Most mystery shopping can be broken into two categories: on-site and over-the-phone. In both cases, mystery shoppers interact with your employees to assess customer service, salesmanship, and other aspects of the experience, such as cleanliness, merchandising, wait times, the complexity of the automated phone-tree, and more. These are tried and true uses, but there are other aspects of your business we can gauge by using some additional creativity.
Here are a few less common but highly insightful uses of mystery shopping you should consider as we build a comprehensive program for your business:
Competitive Mystery Shops
In addition to testing those aforementioned customer experience elements like service and salesmanship at your specific place of business, we can actually send shoppers to your competitors. We withhold who our client is from the shopper to give you the fairest comparison of how both companies perform. This is a tremendous opportunity to gather competitive intelligence to better understand your business’s strengths and weaknesses in the marketplace. As we often say, there is a lot you can learn from the competition, including what to do—and what not to do.
Purchase and Return Mystery Shops
Mystery shoppers usually enter or call a store to express interest in your business’s products or services to see how the employees educate them. But there are other components to the customer experience past these first few steps. What is it like to purchase something from your business? Or return something? We task a purchase and return mystery shopper with to go through the entire process of being your customer to give you a full view of what it’s like to go from greeting to cash register.
Special Event Mystery Shops
If your company participates in special events, whether locally with other community businesses, or at large trade shows, you have an opportunity to use mystery shopping to measure how well your employees handle themselves when not on their home turf. You doubtless have certain goals for why you participate in these events, usually in the form of networking and generating public interest in your business, so it only makes sense that you should want to find out how well your time and other resources are spent.
Online Experience Mystery Shops
As we discussed in a previous blog, you must leverage your online presence to boost visibility and remain part of the conversation. After you’ve put your new webpage design into place and started participating in social media, the time has come to measure how well your digital presence comes together. How easy is it for the common person to navigate your site to learn about a particular product or service? Are they able to locate your business without having to dig around? What impression do they get about your business when reading your social media posts or how you respond to online reviewers? All of these questions can be answered with online mystery shopping.
Mystery Applicant Shops
A business’s best practices encompass more than how your employees interact with your customers. You also expect your hiring managers to use the appopriate criteria when seeking new hires. Want to make sure your managers are asking the right questions (and not the wrong ones)? How well do your they represent your company’s mission statement in private? A mystery applicant can answer whatever questions you have about your hiring process to ensure your managers are properly selling prospective employees on what you offer.
If there’s one thing you take away from this blog, let it be that mystery shopping is incredibly versatile. Whether you stick with the standard shops, or you want to try out the unconventional forms, we’re here to help. When you contact us at The Brandt Group, we take the time to understand your business so we can advise you on the best options available to fully realize your goal of delivering the best customer service and sales experience possible. We look forward to tailoring the right program for your business and can’t wait to get started!
