Category: Mystery Shopping

A:  Allow time for consideration of mystery shop goals, survey question details and possible scenarios during the set up of a new mystery shopping program .

B:  Build on the information that you gain from your mystery shops so that you can improve and redirect your program periodically.

C:  Customize your mystery shopper survey to reflect your firm’s unique service and sales priorities.
 

Mystery shop results help you understand, in detail, how your locations perform in terms of appearance, timeliness, and customer engagement through greeting, customer service and sales behaviors, product knowledge, friendliness and other factors.   The results also provide invaluable information through mystery shopper comments. Open-ended comments reflect mystery shopper observations about what they saw and heard during the mystery shop visit.  They include details that explain a low-scored area or in-depth comments on overall impressions about the visit.
 

Many people, both shoppers and clients alike, tend to make assumptions about the mystery shopping industry. We are not sure how some of these myths began, but we hope to clarify some of them. In this issue, we expose the following three myths:

Gathering competitive business intelligence is an important step in retaining and gaining new customers. To help businesses get the information they need, Confero often executes competitor studies on a large scale and over a considerable length of time. However, there are ways for individual stores to conduct competitive analysis locally and effectively. One way is to use your existing employees as mystery shoppers. Here are simple steps to put a competitor evaluation plan into action:

Many companies spend significant effort in evaluating, selecting and preparing for a mystery shop program. They invest this effort because they know that the information they gain can be used to improve company performance and top the competition.