When most business owners think about mystery shopping, they picture an average consumer entering a store to evaluate the customer experience. This includes everything from the impressions they form when approaching the store’s exterior to how the employees treat them once they’re inside. Additionally, they’ll usually have feedback regarding store layout, merchandising, cleanliness, sales procedures, and even more. All of this information is invaluable, of course; to put it into sports terms, it’s like self-scouting. All the great teams do it.
But there is another dimension to scouting, of course. To continue with the sports metaphor, no professional team goes into a game without first ‘watching the tape’ on their opponent. They study their tendencies, how they handle different situations, and so on. They learn from their opponents’ triumphs and failures, continually finding ways to improve and also adapt to every challenge.
The best mystery-shopping companies out there, The Brandt Group included, offer competitive mystery-shopping services to do something very similar. Much like standard mystery shops, our mystery shopper enters your business to evaluate your priorities, including your sales and service processes. In addition to this, we also send the very same shopper to another location, one of your chosen competitors, to use the exact same survey so you can line up all the X’s and O’s and see how your business compares. Better still, we don’t even tell the shopper which location belongs to our client and which to the competitor to keep the entire process as unbiased and fair as possible.
Even if you believe your business is already much better than your competitors, there is still much to learn from weaker opponents. Reviewing ‘what not to do’ might even be more important than any other lesson you’ll pass on to your employees. As such, we encourage each of our clients to give competitive mystery shopping a try, and to even share the data we collect with their employees to give them a situational awareness of the competitive landscape. This can be invaluable when it comes time for them to reinforce the value your company offers compared to the field. To speak authoritatively on the subject, your employees require knowledge. Give it to them with this kind of data.
Lastly, we can all but guarantee you that your competitors have, are currently, or will soon secretly mystery shop your business. Don’t cede your opponents all of that competitive intelligence without also making sure you collect some of your own. Nothing stays the same forever, so you have to be ready to update your playbook as the need arises.
To get started, reach out to The Brandt Group today using our contact form, or by calling us at 406–586–3036.
