Client Blog

You may hope that your associates embody your brand, but do you sometimes fear that employees don’t quite measure up to your brand’s image? When you achieve parity between brand and how your employees interact with customers, it pays off. When associates don’t mirror your brand, it costs companies plenty.

Social media customer interactions constantly evolve and serve to build the brand. As an example, 48% of consumers who used social media for customer service indicated that they used it to praise a company for a positive experience. Although social media creates impact, one fact remains the same: retail level associates remain a large part of the brand experience. In increasingly competitive environments with fast service expectations and sweeping technological changes, the store continues to be a mainstay.

We recently saw a communication from one of our grocery store clients. A store manager received his mystery shopping report and reminded his employees, “Remember, exceptional service is our best weapon. WalMart is right across the street!”

In the war among grocery retailers, competition for new customers remains fierce. Grocery consumers remain store-loyal and non-traditional grocery stores continue to enter the grocery playing field. Giants like Wal-Mart and Target add even more intensity to the competitive mix. Given these challenges, it’s no wonder that many grocery store chains have mystery shopping in their arsenal. For some grocery retailers, mystery shops go beyond

Like our clients, we find infographics provide a rich and powerful way to show big data and big ideas. The folks at HelpScout developed this one, which is one of our new favorites.

On the spot restaurant reviews, customer service remarks, and feedback on wait times. Whatever customers talk about online, managers immediately learn about customer feelings when they monitor social media. While these instantaneous comments are an important part of understanding customer opinions, the feedback is very different from customer experience services such as mystery shops and customer satisfaction surveys.

Casual online comments travel fast, and make a substantial impact on potential customer buying decisions as well as employee morale. Onsite and telephone mystery shopping results help companies reward employees for positive sales behaviors and fine tune training efforts. Customer opinions through web or mobile surveys provide honest input about employees and services. With these differences in mind, and the added complexity of random online comments, many companies wonder how all three types of research fit together.

Last year, we wrote a well-received article about 25 business types for mystery shopping programs, drawing from our years of experience with a variety of clients in many industries. From convenience stores to upscale retailers to restaurants and medical practices, mystery shopping reports go a long way toward revealing how well employees interact with customers on a daily basis.

So, how do our clients use mystery shopping? Mostly, mystery shopping is used to find out about those things customers won’t tell you in surveys or social media comments, or issues you can't discover by asking customers. If our client has a customer service delivery process or set of procedures in place for fulfilling a brand promise in front of a consumer customer, chances are the process can by mystery shopped.

We’ve compiled our top ten list of mystery shopping uses here.