Mystery Shopping is a process that requires hired mystery shoppers to act as potential customers at any assigned retail outlet in order to monitor the products or customer service standards thoroughly. Many companies today use it as a tool for carrying out market research for any upcoming brand or for measuring the feedback of an existing product. Mystery shoppers are actually researchers disguised as normal customers but they a wide variety of tasks to perform. During an assignment, they might to buy a product, interact with the customers and the employees and ask them various questions, register client complaints, and also make note of the positive feedback from the customers. They create a report based on all the aforesaid observed factors.
Mystery shoppers are required to use a variety of tools to perform the tasks efficiently and get the clear picture of the company’s business practices. These include answering simple questionnaires to capturing the happenings of the outlets in audio or video devices. Mystery shopping can also be done using the internet. Internet based mystery shopping requires registered members of a mystery shopping company to participate in polls on public forums and register their views about a particular product or service. This is of great help to the mystery shopping companies.
Today, there is not one company or industry that employs mystery shopping. Although mystery shopping is mostly used in the retail sector, other industries like, fast food chains, movie theatres, restaurants, financial institution and banks, residential apartments, health clubs, gas stations, churches, non government organizations, health care amenities, etc., also rely on this method of brand and service evaluation.
Mystery shopping is a simple method. There is nothing mysterious about it as it appears from the title. Large companies hire market research firms or mystery shopping companies, who are responsible for planning survey models based on the requirements of the client companies. The survey model includes the information requirements of the client company and the improvement factors that would be derived from the feedbacks of the hired mystery shoppers. The guidelines for the mystery shoppers are drawn on the basis of the client’s requirements and accordingly, mystery shopping assignments and the tools are allocated to the shoppers.
Depending upon the guidelines provided prior to a mystery shopping assignment, the mystery shopper needs to include all the observed points. The details provided in the assignment report help companies get a clear view of their business practices. Specifically, companies can find out how their stores are maintained, whether the products are fresh, whether the employees and frontline staff are following the business ethics strictly, how apt the employees and frontline staff are in resolving customer issues, etc. The details if provided accurately help companies bring about the necessary change and thus improve customer loyalty as well as the brand.
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