What Is Mystery Shopping?

Mystery shopping or secret shopping, primarily involves the utilization of various techniques to judge or evaluate the efficacy of a company’s customer service strategy. In most cases, mystery shopping in Canada involves a firm using trained mystery shoppers who pose as actual customers to get a real feel of the service orientation of the employees. Typically, companies invest a lot of money in training their employees to serve customers better. It has a directly proportional effect on their profitability and revenue growth. Often by the time employees actually put the customer service training into practice, they might have lost interest in the program or may not put in adequate efforts. At such times, if the customer is not served to his/her satisfaction, the firm might lose them forever. To counter this, the Mystery Shopping program is highly effective. Companies across Canada are using trained mystery shopping executives to provide them regular feedback about how they are treated by their employees. Since the employees are unaware of the true background of the mystery shopper, the way they treat the latter decides how well they have been trained in customer servicing techniques.

Although evaluation of customer orientation is one of the major reasons for firms resorting to mystery shopping, there are hosts of other benefits of this concept. You can read more on how a company can benefit by using a secret shopping program at Storage Mart Canadian Secret Shopping Blog.

Some of the key advantages of implementing a Mystery Shopping campaign, from an organizational point of view are listed below.

What Are The Benefits Of Mystery Shopping?

1. Identifying Lacunae in Customer Service: Many firms wrongly assume that by just advertising and marketing their products and services, they can satisfy customers. Often, this is a faulty practice, since companies might not be actually serving the customers in the best possible manner. For example, a firm might have invested millions of dollars in advertising their products on television. However, they might not have taken adequate care to train their employees in selling these products to customers in shops in a friendly manner. Customers might encounter sales personnel across the counter behaving rudely or not responding professionally. When such customers spread their poor experience to their friends and relatives, the firm’s credibility might take a beating. Such experiences have a drastic impact on the firm’s profitability. Using mystery shoppers to identify such lacunae in customer service is one of the most visible benefits of this concept.

2. Identifying Training Needs: Most companies realize that the best way to serve customers better is to train their sales personnel, especially those in the frontline. However, training is a continuous learning process. Mystery shopping helps in identifying those portions of the training that have reached redundancy and need overhauling. For example, in a number of cases, it is observed that sales personnel tend to focus more on customers showing interest in buying more expensive and big-ticket items, and tend to ignore customers with smaller budgets. This is flawed customer service, since low-budget customers have the potential of making purchases that are more substantial. Briefly, it is imperative that training gaps are identified and companies train their employees more holistically. A well-trained staff logically delivers more sales, more satisfied customers, and finally, a healthy and profitable company. Mystery shoppers report such instances of poor training and help companies train their energies in improving the customer service levels. Read more about training needs and related issues at Storage Mart Canadian Secret Shopping Blog.

3. Improving Sales and Profitability: A lot of companies invest in mystery shopping expecting that it will help them automatically increase sales and profits. However, simply hiring of mystery shoppers cannot jack up sales on their own. Mystery shoppers are required to file detailed reports of their observations made during visits to shopping establishments. These reports list their shopping experiences, the way they were attended to by customer service representatives, their overall satisfaction with the shopping experience, the level of training exhibited by frontline executives, and so on. These reports need to be analyzed further to identify what a company does right and what it doesn’t. Simple acts like, greeting the customers, thanking them after a transaction, or even assisting them in choosing the right product can go a long way in delivering good customer service levels. Results from mystery shopping combined with good customer service practices help companies increase sales and profit levels.

Issues Relating To Secret Shopping

It is estimated that the secret shopping industry churns in more than a billion dollars across the United States. With such a large lucrative employment opportunity available within easy reach of people, there are rising cases of fraud associated with these companies as well. There are rising instances of secret shopping companies defrauding vulnerable job seekers into paying large sums of money to sign up as mystery shoppers. It is therefore imperative that prospective job seekers who look at mystery shopping, as a serious employment opportunity must thoroughly undertake a background check of such companies before signing up. On the same lines, mystery-shopping companies in Canada must realize that their secret campaigns are only as effective as their shoppers. As a result, they should put in adequate care and effort to train and help shoppers succeed in their ventures.

Storage Mart Canadian Secret Shopping Blog is a free online resource helping companies and individuals with all the information they need about secret shopping business in Canada. Visit this blog to know more about issues relating to secret shopping assignments in Canada and how one can benefit from such campaigns.

What Are The Best Ways To Undertake A Secret Shopping Canada Campaign?

Like with any campaign, there are a number of techniques, which if adopted, can ensure the successful conclusion of a Secret Shopping Canada campaign.

Firstly, one would need to obtain the buy-in, from every party involved in this campaign. Ranging from the customer service representatives to HR to sales/marketing personnel, it is best to keep as many groups involved as possible. This is especially vital to ensure that people do not approach the campaign with suspicion; rather they are given an opportunity to provide their valuable inputs. It is also important that frontline sales personnel do not view such campaigns as an intrusion or tools meant to monitor and penalize them. It should be made very clear to all such personnel that there is no intention whatsoever to embarrass anyone for failure to perform, instead, secret shopping is a tool to identify the best ways to serve a customer and ‘delight’ him. There should be positive incentives associated with these campaigns and the staff who performs well in these campaigns should be rewarded to set a clear example for their peers.

Secondly, adequate care and diligence must be maintained while short-listing a relevant secret shopping company. Given the large number of companies that claim to offer excellent secret shopping campaigns, the final choice of a company needs to be made carefully. The secret shopping company must have a well-laid policy for recruiting and selecting shoppers. This is because the staff that acts as a shopper must exhibit a genuine interest in the success of the campaign. Once selected, the company must offer these shoppers’ very lucid and articulate training matter as well as comprehensive instructions to follow. This would avoid undue inaccuracies in following the instructions when the shoppers are actually on the job. There must be adequate quality checks in place to ensure that the responses filed by shoppers are genuine, and the campaign is no way jeopardized at any stage. If possible, before signing an agreement, a client should ask the mystery shopping company to furnish details of successful assignments and client list, where available. This would also ensure that you are able to verify that the company has enough qualified shoppers in its database and is not faking data to win the contract.

Thirdly, once a reliable mystery-shopping partner has been identified, adequate care must be taken to create the survey questions, which the shoppers would need to cover. Assuming that one has been able to get buy-in from a variety of stakeholders, their valuable opinion should be incorporated while setting the outline of the questionnaire. A good secret shopping company would also help in creating a practical and actionable survey, one that shoppers would find easy to remember on their shopping trip. Although there is no industry benchmark on an ideal number of questions in a survey, a good survey should not exceed more than 20 pointers. Adequate care must be taken to structure the questionnaire so that it aligns with a company’s core objectives and the value it seeks to derive from a marketing campaign.

Finally, once the results of the campaign have been recorded, studied and the key takeaways tabulated, it is time to incorporate the learning into actuality. Companies that use mystery-shopping campaigns must remember that the ultimate aim is not to gather a lot of data that is difficult to comprehend. On the contrary, the results arrived from such campaigns must be analyzed by the marketing teams, the frontline sales personnel, and even the top-management so that process level changes may be instituted. Tracking customer issues is a long and painful process, so ensure that these campaigns result in maximum return on investment for the marketer.

For further information and insight into mystery shopping assignments in Canada, visit Storage Mart Canadian Secret Shopping Blog.