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Mystery Shopping

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Alex Brown

Mystery Shopping Explained

What is Mystery Shopping?

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 what their attitude is, which could be letting down high points of your store or the well-placed marketing on a website, only to be undermined by a phone call.

We pride ourselves on providing interpretable, actionable results and working with your brand and team to continuously improve.

When to Use a Mystery Shopper?

Mystery Shopping answers the questions you care about the most 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 Mystery Shopping be done online?

Of course. It’s not just Retail & Shopper Research that mystery shopping has a positive effect on the company. Online Mystery Shopping can be conducted over a longer period, examining the entire user journey of a consumer or customer who enquires 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 continuously for business improvement and as a staff performance management tool, giving you the ability to know not only what needs fixing, but also to change 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-performing areas where Employers see no issues. To enquire about mystery shopping, please use the contact us button below.

Social and public sector research news

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