Every brand standardizes its skills to appease its customers. How do we know what a customer feels about your company? How does your company deal with the customer? We need an anonymous person to get this work done. The Mystery Shopping answers all these questions.

Have you ever been a customer who visits the shop just to inspect it?

Have you ever entered the shop just to review it?

Have you ever heard the word mystery shopper?

This unique practice comes under the mystery shopping where a person visits the particular shop to get a lucid review over it.

Check out the example of Google Pixel Mystery Audit done by us here. It  has evolved as the most pragmatic way of extemporizing the performance.

Formerly, let me make you clear about the mystery shopping meaning.

It  is a process in which a person visits a retail store or a restaurant as a normal visitor and fetches a keen understanding of services offered with the objective of measuring the customer experience.

Every company ensures a set of missions with well-designed strategies to attract their customers. They focus on these principles to attract customers with good experience in the sales experience.

To ensure all these principles are followed in the company, they hire mystery shoppers to conduct regular audits at their shared business locations.

Thus mystery shopping aids in understanding the customer experience. There are many mystery shopping companies in India for implementing this service.

It has now adapted itself and grown into a customer service oriented program. Mystery shopping aids in dealing even with the minuscule issues of the customers.

• Validating Sales Techniques:

  Waiters at restaurants are usually trained for suggestive selling techniques and for trying to sell a dish. Mystery shopping is used for inspecting the waiters wherein the shopper poses as a customer to verify whether a waiter is doing what he is supposed to do as per his training.

• Ace the Competition:

  Since a store’s manager himself cannot check out his competitor, mystery shoppers are hired to size up the competition’s merchandise, deals and overall feeling of the store. It is a better approach to know what are the strategies used by your competitors. This also makes you aware of the different strategies used.

• Validating Center Hygiene:

  The exterior cleanliness and branding create an impression on the consumer’s mind to step-in. Service Hygiene is a reflection of how clean and well maintained the interiors are. The parameters which are evaluated as a part of the announced audit include Exterior Hygiene, Branding visibility and condition, Cleanliness.

• Customer Experience :

  Customer experience is evaluated right from booking an appointment to service standards and billing experience. The parameters evaluated through the mystery shopper includes them.

• Appointment booking:

  Time to respond to call, Greeting and introduction, Staff knowledge, Confirmation of customer details and the waiting time.

  The Welcome includes the Greetings, Offering a welcome drink, Waiting time, Allocating staff, Assistance till service room.

• Staff Interaction & Service standards:

  Greeting and Introduction about service availed, Providing fresh clothes for changing, Product knowledge, Up-selling skills, and Pitching Membership Plan to the customers.

Aim of Mystery Shopping:

The purpose of mystery shopping is NOT nametags fired by catching them doing something wrong. It is not to give anyone a free pass either. The sole aim of the exercise is to tell the company what they are doing right or wrong and how they can improve, to simply tell them what happened as it happened.

These organizations advise that their research should only be used for employee incentive programs and that punishment or firing is an inappropriate use of mystery-shopper data.

However, stories of employees being fired as a direct result of negative mystery shopper feedback are not uncommon.