Mystery Shopping Explained

Mystery Shopping market research is a methodology that allows you to understand your customers’ interactions with the public-facing side of your brand.

Mystery Shoppers allow you to understand how your staff are acting and their attitude, which could be letting down high points of your store or the well-placed marketing on a website, to be let down by a phone call.

We pride ourselves on being able to provide interpretable and actionable results and work within your brand and your team to continuously improve.

When to Use a Mystery Shopper

Mystery Shopping answers the questions you care the most about as a brand. If you’re a brand, you might be wondering:

• As a retailer, knowing how your outlets conform to your policies
• As a Franchisor, you may want to ensure all your franchises are sticking to the brand values
• A Local authority is concerned with the response time that enquirers get through email or telephone
• Unsure how to improve your responses, and want to see how your competitors respond to similar queries
• Ensure your measures of employee engagement are working and driving the correct business outcomes

Can it be done online?

Of course. It’s not all Retail & Shopper Research that mystery shopping has a positive effect on the company. Online Mystery Shopping can be built over a longer period, looking into the whole user journey for a consumer or customer coming to enquire about a service or product. It is particularly useful because you’ll receive insights into different aspects of the business throughout the different stages of an enquiry, so you can see if there is a pothole along the way.

Mystery Shopping can be used on a continuous basis for improvement as a business and a staff performance management tool, giving you the ability to know not only what needs fixing, but you’ll have a tool that can change the actions and behaviours.

We believe that a Mystery Shopper is most effective in tandem with an Employee Satisfaction Survey, giving you a first-hand experience of what your staff are thinking, providing insight that can go alongside the behaviour that is observed, and you receive explanations as to why they might act in a particular manner. It can also show lower performance areas where Employers see no area of issue. To enquire about mystery shopping, please use the contact us button below.