Mystery Shopping or secret shopping is an evaluation process that is widely used by most of the organizations or companies to measure the quality of their services provided to the customers. When performing mystery shopping, mystery shoppers will be visiting selected stores and outlets and act like a normal shopper whilst observing and measuring customer experience in the outlets discreetly by following the questionnaires or guidelines given.

The information collected varies across organizations depending on the research objectives. Some organizations would like to monitor the service quality of staff, pricing, displays and others to test on the brand advocacy and many more.

Mystery shopping will provide the management insights into the quality of their staff services from the perspective of a customer. Mystery shoppers become an extension of management's eyes and ears. By deploying mystery shoppers, we are able to help to identify performance gaps and test the functionality of their SOPs.

By actively carrying out mystery shopping, this will ensure that staff will constantly be motivated to perform without compromising standards and quality, and this could be tied in to a reward system for good performance.

There is a saying - if it is not tracked, it is not managed. As an organization grows and gets bigger, the management will need a lot of unbiased and independent opinion on improving the business presence and services towards its customers as active monitoring of service quality is infeasible.

Study shows that 78% of unsatisfied customers will give up dealing altogether. Only 4% of customers will complain. Most of the unhappy customers will not make repeat purchases and have a higher tendency of spreading their negative experiences amongst their network, which is destructive towards the brand's reputation and adversely impacting sales.

Hence tracking and monitoring staff performance becomes an utmost importance to ensure customer satisfaction is met.

Our recruitment follows a stringent process as the tasks to perform is beyond just being a normal shopper. Different organizations will have different research methodology and requirements for mystery shoppers.

We will first pre-screen our mystery shoppers based on client's standards and criteria relating to their industry. For example, females will be preferred for any beauty line industry, or family with Kids will be preferred for baby product audit. The selected mystery shopper will then be given a briefing on the work and they will need to perform a trial.

Only those who passed the trial will be selected and engaged as our mystery shopper for a particular client’s objective.

Our mystery shopping proposal is highly customisable based on your needs. We are able to manage the process end to end from designing and proposal of questionnaires and methodology with your input, defining tracking criteria, recruitment of mystery shoppers, management of mystery shoppers, quality control check, data analysis in excel or powerpoint and presentation on the findings to the management.

The tasks of mystery shoppers include activities like purchasing products, asking questions, filing complaints, or acting like a new employee to test on the internal SOP. These companies will have a defined set of parameters or key performance indicators for their employees to ensure standardisation in the service delivered.

Mystery shopping is a highly customized audit that varies depending on an organization’s business objectives and business needs. To obtain free quote, please share with us the following:

1. Objective of tracking
2. Coverage (number of outlets to track and its location)
3. Frequency of tracking
4. Tracking methodology or tracking criteria

If you are still unsure if mystery shopper is an appropriate and effective solution for your organization, feel free to get in touch with us and we are happy to chat and offer our thoughts and advice for free.

No worries - we have an NDA signed to give you a peace of mind.