10 Benefits of Mystery Shopper Visits
There are many methods of discovering the experience your customer receives when they choose to do business with you. For example, surveys of staff and customers, but this may not offer the same reality and insights as having an undercover customer who is trained to assess a customer’s experience.
The experience a customer receives is assessed by gathering data within a particular business. This method can be employed for any industry; however, it is regularly carried out in the retail and hospitality sectors to evaluate staff interactions with customers and the overall methodology of buying.
An external company hires undercover customers and they are given assignments to test the staff in the business anonymously.
So why should you conduct undercover customer campaigns? Are you looking to improve your business? Do know what your customer is experiencing?
Mystery shopper visits can deliver an abundance of valuable insights to any business or management team.
Undercover customer visits can also expose strengths and weaknesses within your business, which will assist you in implementing strategies to enrich customer experience, increase revenue and help you stand out from the rest.
10 benefits of using undercover customers in your business
1) Enhances Customer Service
It identifies the kind of experience your customers are experiencing and the skill levels of your staff.
Undercover customers anonymously visit a business either physically, digitally or by phone. The exchanges with the staff members, processes followed, behaviours and staff who gave the undercover customer a positive or negative experience are reported on. These valuable insights can be used to execute new procedures, train staff or specific qualities can be recognized when hiring staff.
2) Feedback from the customers’ eyes
Dependable, specific, and valuable feedback is given from a customer’s point of view.
Certain areas for example, experience, satisfaction, and brand perception that may need to be tested can be highlighted. Problems or potential hazards in the business can be immediately identified. What is alright from the business’s perspective may not be ideal from a customer’s perspective and this can be identified and given consideration.
Service excellence, the presence or arrangement of products in the store, the flavour of the cuisine and all other characteristics of being in your business may likely seem different from a consumer’s perspective than your own. The honest feedback of an undercover customer can give you valuable insights so that appropriate measures can be taken to fix them, if required.
3) Increases revenue
One of the valuable tasks of an undercover customer is to collect vital information on the selling process.
Vital information, for example, on how products were sold to them, the layout of products in the store, the kind of menu that was available, discovering what products are favored and what are not or how the sales techniques of the staff affected the customer’s decision to make the purchase or not, can all be exposed.
4) Responses to specific questions
Gaining a better understanding of what is happening in your business may not be the only thing that you would like to know.
You may want to know if your staff can answer specific questions or you may have a promotion going on and you want to know if this is being passed on. Or you may want to know how easy it is for your customer to return an item. Undercover customers can come in with this specifically in mind and gauge staff attentiveness and ability. They can also identify how conflict resolution is dealt with, determine the effectiveness of product arrangement or any other part or process that you may want to understand to enhance your business.
5) Monitors and measures service performance
Undercover customers come in with fresh eyes and objectively measure and monitor if staff maintain the business’s service standards, follows their processes and procedures.
This responsibility usually comes down to individual store managers, however, familiarity with their stores may result in blind spots forming.
This method of monitoring and measuring permits you to get the big picture including the individual details from each store, location, and even individual staff. These insights will allow you to act accordingly to increase efficiency by training staff to maintain a consistent delivery of quality services.
Staff who are unproductive and maybe untrained in specific areas can also be determined.
6) Provides feedback on staff performance
Specific sales techniques can take someone from wanting to make a cheap purchase, a sale item or standard product or service to a comparable one that has far more features. The result is that it is a better product/service, may make life more convenient, or maybe with less maintenance, but will be more expensive and will deliver more benefits to the customer, and for the business owner, an increase in revenue.
So are staff using any sales techniques? Are they selling actively or passively? Do they know how to upsell or cross-sell? How were customer complaints handled? Are staff professional in their manner? What is the level of their product knowledge, and do they care about the customer? Was the customer acknowledged, greeted, smiled at or were they ignored? Is the store clean? Are staff on their mobile phones when customers are present? Are standard and legal requirements met?
And so on!
How staff members conduct themselves when managers are not around will also be clear.
7) Recognizes training needs
All the above benefits can encourage the business to be aware of the areas that may need improvement, specifically staff training. How can there be more efficiency? How can the staff member be more helpful to the customer? Employee integrity and knowledge is implemented.
8) Makes staff aware of what is important in serving customers
Undercover customers act like real customers. They are trained to ask specific questions and look for behaviors, products, and assess the store itself. Someone asking those questions, then highlighting places that can be improved, can assist staff become aware of how the customers want to be served.
9) Benchmarks competitors
Competition is fierce in every sector. Understanding the competitions weaknesses and strengths, how they perform, what they are up to, what is their customers experiences, their offers, prices maybe or how their store layout is structured can all assist in discovering where you are placed on the continuum and how you can improve to stand above them!
10) Improves Customer retention
Every single one of these benefits leads to one big super benefit – Customer Retention!
Losing customers is inevitable, particularly if it is a physical site, and your customers move elsewhere.
The vital piece of information here is to identify if your customers have left voluntarily or involuntarily.
The voluntary customers have made a conscious decision to change suppliers and have most likely gone to your competitors. There are usually three reasons as to why this happens: poor customer service, poor facilities or poor goods or services.
Every improvement made in business resulting from valuable insights gained through an undercover customer visit leads to good quality customer service, superior customer experience and this means your customers will choose your business over your competitors – every time!
Identifying which of these concerns can only improve general client experience and undercover customer visits can help you discover this.
Undercover customer visits are objective, collecting data from robust questions, using trained undercover customers. These strong answers are intended at producing valuable insights that can be actioned to improve business and its service.
To be successful, it is essential for businesses to understand all the ins and outs of their business, how their staff are interacting with their customers and what kind of experience their customers are having.
Done regularly, these valuable insights will help efficiently conduct targeted training to their staff, enhance customer service, increase revenue, convert browsers into buyers, have customer retention, know what their competitors are up to so that they can stand out above the crowd, boost business, and increase revenue.