Mystery shopping and its importance for stores
Mystery shopping, also known as secret shopping, is the method
by which a store or a company evaluates its employees'
performance. In this a person in disguise pretends to be a
shopper, visits the store, interacts with the employees and
assesses their ability to build a rapport with the customer in
order to sell their products. That person is actually hired by
the store owner or the company proprietor to, assess the
performance of employees and in the end submit the report to the
proprietor. The person hired is called mystery shopper.
Apart from evaluation of performances, mystery shoppers analyze
other commercial aspects of retail stores. These aspects could
be price, availability, and quality of the product; customer
service via websites, telephones and in person; and house
keeping. The freelance professionals called secret shoppers then
hand over their assessment to the company head who actually
hired them.
There are no essential requirements to be a secret shopper, as
shoppers don't have specific appearance or qualification. Those
who have a flair and passion to enhance the customer service and
the quality of the product can plunge into secret shopping. It
would be interesting to learn that the secret shoppers are paid
for their job. It is a profession just like any other profession.
Although the job entails shopping which is fun, mystery shopping
is a serious business and should be carefully dealt with. There
must be certain innate traits within a person that would be
helpful in being a secret shopper. These traits are the ability
to act or pretend, being trustworthy, reliable and professional.
Apart from all these, secret shoppers should have a better mode
of transportation, good writing skills and a clear perspective
of actual reporting and their personal opinion so that the truth
is not tampered.
The stores make use of mystery shopping to uplift their sales by
improving customer satisfaction. Secret shoppers are hired
wholely and solely to increase sales by improving the
performance of the employees. Mystery shopping is useful not
just for evaluating the staff's performance but also for
checking the customer service offered by the rival business. It
can be compared with one's own customer service to find the
problem areas. The problems can then be rectified to increase
the number of customers and hence the sales.
Before hiring a mystery shopper make sure to inquire about the
services that the shopper has in hand, do the research well
before hiring. Conducting an audit of the employees is a tough
job as it is mandatory that they do not get prior information
regarding this exercise otherwise they will not present their
true picture at the time of scrutiny.
A store manager keeps a vigil on his employees while they deal
with the customers in person and over the phone. This often
makes the employees nervous and they become inadvertent under
pressure. Instead a mystery shopper brings out the true picture
of the employees as they perform naturally. This helps to locate
the fault and the drawbacks of each and every employee perfectly
which subsequently helps in improving customer satisfaction.
Sometimes the customers inquire about the products over the
phone before coming to the store. In this situation, the
employee's ability to converse with them over the phone, in
order to convert the caller into a potential customer, matters
the most. To locate the faults of the employee, some fake calls
are required, and only a professional mystery shopper can do it.
A store can avail the same kind of services provided by the
companies for the product distribution and marketing. Mystery
shoppers are hired by the companies to find out what the
customers think about the new product that hits the market.
Mystery shoppers are known by many names like virtual customers,
evaluators in disguise and spotters but they solve only one
purpose of enhancing the customer service of a store and
increasing its sales.