The 4 W's of Mystery Shopping
Many leading brands are moving into multi-faceted market research, placing the customer squarely at the center of their effort. By combining the voice of the customer with secret shopper benchmark data and competitive mystery shops, we can help you make connections within and across customer experience datasets.
Who
An effective mystery shopping program is designed to give you actionable insight about your business. There are many ways to listen to your customers and to build in customer feedback loops—sometimes called voice of the customer data.
But, this data is only half of the story. Mystery shopping data is fundamentally different from voice of the customer data because mystery shops are conducted by paid, professional secret shoppers. That's the "who".
Most often, secret shoppers are selected to match your customer demographics. Second To None employs more than 200,000 shoppers in the United States and Canada, and as a managing partner in the International Mystery Shopping Alliance, works with brands wherever you do business. These professionals are trained to evaluate selected aspects of your business, and to report their findings to Second To None.
What
Mystery shopping is the act of entering your brand environment to evaluate performance. The interactions and service delivery that occurs during that "shop" are the "what". It is important to recognize that a shop does not end when the secret shopper leaves your brand environment. Secret shoppers must complete a questionnaire about their experience and submit it to Second To None.
It's easiest to understand the "what" if we examine the process in more detail. After you contact Second To None, we partner with you to complete a discovery and questionnaire design process. The outcome of this process is an ROI-driven questionnaire that our secret shoppers use in their evaluation of your brand environment. (See value-added mystery shopping program design and questionnaire development for more.) We work with you to design a questionnaire that yields actionable insight.
Traditional shops involve the interactions between your in-store associates and our secret shoppers. Other common shop types include competitive, employee-reward, operational compliance, telephone, video-recorded, audio-recorded, online, brand audit and point of sale shops.
Where
Shops take place in a number of brand environments, be they in-store, by telephone, over the web, at a kiosk, or another customer interface to your products and services. The "where" include any customer touch points.
In its infancy, mystery shopping focused on restaurant/food service industries because of the direct correlation between repeat revenue and customer service. Presently, mystery shopping primarily serves the financial, retail, restaurant/food service, hospitality and grocery industries.
Why
It's about the bottom line.
Mystery shopping results lead to bottom line growth. A properly designed mystery shopping program begins with strategic objectives and builds from there. Using your objectives, mystery shopping data and voice of the customer data, we can help you identify key drivers to customer satisfaction, best opportunities for up-selling/cross-selling, factors that affect employee performance, even the incremental revenue associated with a percentage increase in the customer experience.
Second To None has shown a direct correlation between mystery shopping data and voice of the customer data. We know that mystery shopping data is a leading indicator of the customer experience. A long-term approach to mystery shopping recognizes that as customer expectations shift, so too must your execution. Smart companies use mystery shopping to help them anticipate changes in the customer perspective.
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