Effective Mystery Shopping Methods, Secret Shopping Assignments to Judge Brand Competitiveness

The success of every business lies in the gratification of a delighted customer and needless to say, this is what every business owner aim at. They always have the fear of lagging behind in the fierce competition of the brands and hence strive to perform better. With the various modern market research methods, the analysis of the current trends and business performances has become easy and quick. One such popular method that companies rely on is mystery shopping or secret shopping. Mystery shopping is nothing but a simple, yet infallible method applied to evaluate product conditions and employee performance.

Mystery shoppers are the ‘hidden cameras’ that help companies know their overall businesses competence. As mystery shoppers, they need to disguise as regular customers and visit a particular outlet as assigned. The qualities that companies want the mystery shopper to have are good surveillance and writing skills. The surveillance skill is necessary to minutely observe the happenings in a store right from the store ambience to product conditions to employee conduct. Good writing skill, on the other hand, is necessary as mystery shoppers need to write down their shopping experiences in detailed and honest reports. Employers expect flawless, unbiased and grammatically correct reports since they base their major business decisions on the same. The reports help find out the problem areas that can be immediately rectified and improved.

The mystery shopping process

The mystery shopping procedure may sound simple but it’s rather elaborate. Companies provide special training to every hired individual so that they can carry out the secret shopping assignments flawlessly. A typical mystery shopping assignment involves shoppers to pose as customers and make purchases as per company’s instruction. During this process, they need to be watchful of important factors, like, the store environment, cleanliness, product maintenance, behaviour of the frontline staffs and assistants, and the aptness of the staff in attending to the customers. They can either secretly record the series of events in audio or video devices or write them down once done with the assignment. The report is then forwarded to the higher management who reviews them and send to the employers for the final decisions. As mentioned earlier, the reports need to be well-written covering every single detail of the shopping experience. There is no need to provide any literary touch to the reports as employers look forward to receiving only comprehensible and point-specific contents with the correct usage of grammar. Accordingly, further improvements are made and the good performances are rewarded. All these collectively count the most to make a brand the most talked about.