If we had a pound for every time businesses thought, “mystery shopping is just for retail shopping, right?,” we’d have all retired early! It’s so much more than just retail. Here’s how it could be just the new performance improvement tool you’re looking for, to help boost your business in 2023.
Mystery shopping programmes deliver great insights into how your business is performing… at a variety of touch points whilst driving positive behaviours within customer facing teams at the same time.
Yes, it’s a great way to assess the customer experience, but it’s so much more powerful than that! Read on to find out more.
As mystery shopping specialists over the last 31 years, we can safely say we’ve done our fair share of assessments!
We’ve assessed betting shops, installation engineers, universities, hairdressers, plumbers and dentists. We’ve pretended to be caravanners, pregnant women, bankrupt, hard-of-hearing, teenagers looking for contraception, pensioners buying insurance and trainee teachers. We’ve set up plumbing blockages and car faults, cheated in exams (to check the invigilators are alert), parked illegally (to test the council’s parking wardens), shoplifted (to check the security) and gone on timeshare holidays. We’ve parked bicycles to see how quickly they get stolen (quickest was 75 minutes – in Croydon). We even have our own dummy businesses with websites.
We don’t just supply data or tick-boxing exercises; our aim is to provide a programme that drives positive behaviours across teams. We work with you and your team to interpret the results and outline actions to enable your business to continuously improve.
Does your business operate in any of the following industries?
Automotive
Hospitality
Fundraising
Retail
Transport
Care
Leisure
Local Government
Education
Services
B2B
Recruitment
If the answer’s yes, then we can help you.
Our programmes are designed to deliver actionable results, which we can help you implement. We’ll even work with your teams to help get the programme off to a great start.
We design our mystery shopping programmes to ensure they also boost employee engagement and motivation. Off the back of your insights, you can use positive results to reward teams and incentivise others in the future.
But a quick survey will just give me the same results won’t it?
Not at all. Surveys are subjective and are often only completed by those who feel comfortable doing so, or those who really like filling them out! They will rarely be used to provide constructive feedback people tend to avoid confrontation at all costs. Instead they will save it for sharing with friends and family. Paid mystery shoppers will give you honest feedback on the entire customer journey from entry to the follow up received days later, and will report back on how the experience truly was.
Mystery shopped can provide more detailed and targeted feedback than surveys, as you control the question, and the insights gained can help improve customer experiences and increase customer retention. A positive experience can bring customers back, while a negative one may drive them away.
I can just rely on reviews can’t I?
When was the last time you left a positive review?
How about a negative one?
Most of us don’t tend to regularly provide reviews, we just tell everyone else instead. Usually, if someone does choose to leave a review, it will only be if they have received a very positive, or very negative customer experience – not the average experience. Mystery shopping provides purely objective feedback across a range of times and days, so you can find out exactly what happened, and decide if it meets your expectations, or not.
Why choose us?
Operating for over 30 years, we’ve built up a database of over 350,000 mystery shoppers with full UK and Ireland coverage. You tell us your typical customer and we’ll match it with our wide range of demographics to ensure they don’t stand out, and you get a variety of experiences captured.
On average, each month we complete 10,000 assessments based on visits, calls, website, email and social media data. This data can be captured by audio, video and via call recording. Each client has a bespoke programme design and we are competitively priced!
If you’d like to discuss how a mystery shopping programme can help your business, contact our client team on 01409 255025,
enquiries@mystery-shoppers.co.uk.