A technique called mystery shopping ensures that brands fulfill their promises to customers in a consistent manner. Companies can use mystery shopping to learn more about what typical consumers go through and determine whether current level of service meets set company standards. This approach effectively addresses customer experience issues, bringing crucial parts of service to light, and promotes organizational behavior changes to enhance and ensure a better customer experience.
While Mystery shopping can be a valuable tool for businesses to improve customer service, designing a successful customer-facing behavior requires several critical inputs:
- customer needs, expectations, perceptions, even language they use – in other words companies should design Mystery shopping with customer in mind. Organizations often make mistakes by focusing on their own targets instead of their customers’ perspective. Customer input should be integrated into the program through driver analysis, customer journey maps, qualitative research insights and even internal talks on customer shopping behavior with first-line staff members.
- corporate strategic goals, which aid in guiding the Mystery shopping method toward precise and clear objectives
- market and competitor data informing the best practices, especially in terms of employees’ sales and recommendation behavior.
In today’s market where customers are shopping in multichannel and have intricate and sophisticated customer journeys, Mystery shopping should also measure service across brick and mortar, contact centers, and digital, taking into account all significant journey touchpoints. This will help ensure the mystery shopping program aligns with rounded customer journey and delivers clear value.
Although the key Mystery shopping objectives are related to improving customer experience and satisfaction, increasing likelihood for recommendation (NPS), purchase and upsell and reducing customer churn, flexibility in evaluating front line personel behavior is necessary. For example, in some situations the focus in real life may be on building a relationship and making the customer feel appreciated and valued rather than pushing hard sales or upselling. Mystery shopping program should take this into account.