Employing a Mystery Shopping Company – Your Questions Answered

Improves Employee Engagement

Receiving customer feedback on performance reveals to employees what should be prioritized in their customer service and engagement. Armed with this knowledge, employees can focus their energy on more meaningful behaviors, and limit their effort spent on actions that have little impact on brand delivery.

This, in effect, kills two birds with one stone. It increases employee focus on branded customer service, and improves productivity simultaneously. Equally, by reporting back on specific employee interactions, businesses can extract tangible insights about the way their team behaves toward potential buyers, and tailor their CX strategy with verified insights, coaching sessions and more.

Improves Customer Experience and Retention

Many of the KPIs that mystery shoppers audit directly impact customer experience. By directly measuring these metrics, and then improving on those that are lacking, a business can only better its customer service. Improved customer service in turn increases customer satisfaction, driving heightened levels of brand advocacy and repeat business.

By improving customer satisfaction, brands equally increase customer retention; happy customers are less likely to leave your business for a competitor, after all.

Enforces Compliance

Mystery shopping reveals how staff behave when they are unaware that they are being actively monitored. These observations are not meant to penalize but to reward an engaged team of frontline staff . A common use for mystery shopping is to assess whether your employees are complying with legal or franchise standards. By making staff aware that they may be assessed at any time, and “regular customers” may be mystery shopper visits, businesses can prevent standards from slipping.

Additionally, mystery shopping gives employees a very material reason to be educated on product specifications and potential customer queries. It enables team members to get in the loop, stay in the loop and close the loop.

Increases the Effectiveness of Promotional Programs

The phrase “do you want fries with that” is the well-established catchphrase of the food service worker “Super Sizing”. Despite the image associated with it, it’s actually an example of a simple upsell, a very basic promotional program. It is so well-known because it has been so successful.

Even if it isn’t successful every time, if servers asked this question with every burger sold, the average transaction would increase, and with it, overall revenue.

But how could a business be certain this question was asked with every burger ordered? A promotional program’s effectiveness will only be known if it is deployed across the board. Simultaneously, an effective promotional program won’t have the desired impact if it’s only employed by 50% of locations.

Allows For Consistent Actionable Comparison with Other Metrics

Many brands are using Net Promoter Score (NPS) as an easy way to measure customer sentiment.  A mystery shopping program compliments NPS by adding an extra layer of depth to its numerical – and largely limiting – customer insights. 

Mystery Shopping audits will often take place domestically or globally over multiple countries, cities, locations. The data analytics received allows for more multifaceted comparisons to be made between locations and geographies that will support the consistent delivery of the brand value. This type of customer experience research may show which locations need greater training, or reveal locations where customer experience is excellent, even if this isn’t reflected by sales figures.

A discrepancy between sales figures and mystery shop score could reveal locations being held back from greater sales by CX failings, or locations that are only being kept afloat by the quality of their CX. In either instance, brands receive feedback that will inform the decision made to revamp strategy and delivery.

Boosts Revenue

All the benefits above will achieve one thing, the overall aim of your business strategy – increasing your revenue and growing your business.

By increasing employee engagement, you can reduce employee turnover. This cuts the expenses associated with training new recruits and losses in efficiency from new staff that are not yet fully onboarded.

The enforcement of compliance with legal requirements reduces the risk of your company incurring fines, as well as the legal expenses involved in contesting potential fines. A more comprehensive deployment of promotional programs allows for better judgement of which programs impact sales positively. It also increases the positive impact the more effective ones have.

Comparing locations on KPIs other than sales figures provides greater insight as to why some are failing to perform. This understanding can help in identifying areas for improvement at those locations to boost their numbers. These comparisons can also reveal why other locations may be exceeding expectations. Plus, by identifying what is driving such a positive impact, these improvements can be rolled out across the board. 

Finally, by improving customer service, customer satisfaction will be enhanced. Marketing research has found that happier customers boosts customer retention, and repeat customers statistically spend 67% more per transaction than first-time buyers.