What is Mystery shopping?
Mystery shopping is market research methods to check the quality of products, customer service and collect data competitor-specific information. Random select real customer with reasonable and tested qualifications, become and investigator in real situations. Investigator will act like a normal customer and anonymously. It’s called Mystery Shopper or Shopper.
The main content obtained from mystery shopping is customer satisfaction that can indicate the growth and stability of the business, because of customer satisfaction affects the customer retention and opportunity to get a new customer base. This will allow business to keep track of customer directions and trends be able to adjust in time.
Benefit of Mystery Shopping
Assess compliance with brand standards
Every business has set working standards for employees to follow. But can’t check at any time that employees always follow that standard or not, Mystery Shopping can solve this problem. Sending the shopper to check without revealing the identity causing the actual working conditions of employees to comply with the brand’s standards.
Customer service development
Mystery Shopping will make some services that can be better developed such as serve food by being careful not to make noise, increase the speed of service In addition to the service from the staff and contacting after-sales service can be improved.
Assess the customer experience
Although the staff can follow the brand’s standards, it does not mean that the customer will always have a good experience. Because there may be something that makes customers unhappy, such as the shop area is so narrow that it is not convenient to walk. Mystery Shopping can help identify the point where customers have a bad experience during access to the service.
Make employees enthusiastic
If we inform employees that Mystery Shopping is used to monitor the work of employees, employees will be more alert and enthusiastic always making employees perform well.
Identify employees who behave inappropriately
If there is a problem during the investigation, the shopper can tell what happened and identify which employees are inappropriate and can solve the problem appropriately.
Receive feedback from customers
Checking with Mystery Shopping, Shopper summary of all access to the service and points that do well or impress including the part that should be improved to make the service better.
Check the competitors
Mystery Shopping is not limited to checking only our own business but can also check the work and service of the competitor’s business. Checking competitors will make compare that our business with competitors in the same industry has what are the strengths and disadvantages. Which point we do better than competitors and where competitors are superior to us causing us to bring the information here to develop our business to be comparable or superior to competitors.
Type of Mystery Shopping
1. In-Person Mystery Shopping
It is a store inspection such as restaurant, car showroom and clothing store. Shopper will go into the store to check such as how to recommend products to employee, displaying products in the store. This type of inspection shows the actual working conditions of the employee and the real situation of the shop. Make us to know and understand the customer’s view of our product and services.
2. Telephone Mystery Shopping
Telephone Mystery Shopping is to check the call center service of business. Call center employees able to handle incoming customer calls well, also check the convenience and speed of the call connection process in the call center system.
3. Online Mystery Shopping
Online Mystery Shopping is to checking services through online channels such as applications, web sites, email and social media to check the experience that customers receive from using it and the administrator’s response.
4. Hybrid Mystery Shopping
It is an inspection that has many parts that the shopper must inspect within a single inspection such as Inspection of hotel services. There are many points including booking accommodations, room conditions, swimming pools, restaurants until check-out.
How does Mystery Shopping it work?
The Mystery Shopping process has a variety of styles according to the needs of the examination but can be summarized as follows.
1. Specify the purpose of doing Mystery Shopping
What do you want to check? Or want to know what information. Design the inspection process which the employer and the service company must discuss clearly.
2. Design the inspection process
The service provider will design an inspection process that is consistent with the work process of the employer’s business and questionnaire that shoppers must fill out Includes scoring criteria for each question.
3. Shopper
The service company will announce inspection work to shoppers who meet the qualifications that the inspection work requires. Then the shopper will be selected by testing and summarize the overall of the work before inspecting.
4. Inspect and collect data
Shopper went the store on the specified day and time. Then fill out the information in the questionnaire.
5. Evaluate and summarize data
The service company collect all data and summarize the results.
Mystery Shopping is about checking the quality of products and services of your business in order to see the overall of the actual work. See strengths and weaknesses that need to be improve. The collecting data will help your business plan and increase customer satisfaction.
