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:

• Distribute mystery shop forms to selected employees from each location.
• Review the survey questions and discuss why each area is important to the success of your store.
• Next, employees choose a competitor to visit and evaluate. The competitor can be one that they hear about frequently from customers, one that has a new offer, or a competitor that is new to the area. Better yet, if you frequently lose sales to a certain competitor, make their location a priority visit.
• Employees visit the competitor and, immediately following, record what they observed and heard during their interaction.
• Employees should consider how their location ranks against the competition. Did the competitor’s employees say and do things that they felt contributed to great service? Did the competitor’s service include some of the same standards as their own? Did they include something in a product presentation that was attention-grabbing and effective?
• You may also want your employees to conduct telephone mystery shops prior to the in person competitor visits. The employees can make calls during slow times and make notes regarding the conversations. How does their location’s phone skills measure up to the competition? Are telephone standards too low? Are they high enough to differentiate themselves from the competition?
• Review the business intelligence with other employees to gain their feedback.

• Develop a plan of action to emphasize your strengths over the competition. As an example, you can design a chart that compares features and benefits of your service vs. those of your competitor. Employees can use this information – not to talk negatively about the competition – but to emphasize areas where their services outperform the competition.

So, as you can see, mystery shops can provide more than an important piece of your customer experience research. Using your own employees and an existing mystery shop form can allow you to understand and evaluate the competition first hand. Then use this information to exceed them!