Customer experience matters to your business. Countless studies show that brands that deliver excellent service achieve customer loyalty and repeat business.
In this age of customer-centricity, delivering a positive customer experience is a necessity for every business. With heightened consumer expectations, ease of online shopping, and the power of social media owned by customers, maintaining an exceptional customer experience is very difficult these days. However, mystery shopping can help alleviate these issues and concerns for your business.
What is mystery shopping?
This is a market research method that involves sending trained shoppers to evaluate and measure different aspects of your business. Test shoppers interact with the staff and products disguised as regular customers. With this research, brands can understand what an average customer experiences, and discover issues, trends, and staff performance. The study also highlights which part of the sales journey or touchpoint needs to be improved. Thus, this research helps to identify issues and take remedial measures to improve customer experience.
How to craft a better mystery shopping program?
Designing a better mystery shopping program is vital for your business. A poorly crafted program does not deliver valuable results necessary for your business. Let us see the six steps to design a better program:
- Define your objectives
Define clear objectives that you wish to solve with this program. The absence of objectives makes this study diluted and doesn’t deliver value to your organization. Decide whether you wish to improve customer experience, measure brand standards, or comply with the regulations through this program. Once you set the objectives, it becomes easy to implement this program aligning with your strategy and business goals.
- Know the target customers
The next step to remember while designing this program is the potential customers. Know the demographic profile, preferences, and other qualities. Craft every aspect of this program keeping the prospects in mind. This is an important step to bring the perspectives of the targeted audience into your business.
- Select the right evaluators
To bring valuable and quality insights, you must select the right evaluators for this research. The success depends a lot upon their observation and professional skills. Maintaining anonymity and attention to detail is crucial to achieve success. Moreover, evaluators must fit into the personas of the targeted demographic. Train the selected mystery shoppers based on your requirements to achieve desirable results.
- Design a quality questionnaire
The next step is to design an excellent questionnaire to capture things that you wish to measure in your organization. The questions should be objectives to prevent quality issues. Random questions bring diluted results and won’t be valuable to your business.
- Create a smart sampling plan
Once you design the checklists, it is time to formulate a smart sampling plan. Conduct the visit with perfect scenarios to collect quality data. This is crucial to collect quality information within a few visits to your stores. Otherwise, you will end up spending more money with more visits.
- Design a perfect analytic plan
The primary goal of this study is to bring insights into business operations and understand customer preferences, and issues with your organization. Without a perfect analytic plan, you won’t get actionable insights. Make sure that the mystery shoppers collect videos and recordings to attach to the report.
Final Thoughts
A well-thought-out and optimized evaluation program will bring quality data that impact positively on your business. The study should include everything that you wish to evaluate and measure with the test shoppers. Moreover, you should focus on the proper execution of this market research to achieve quality results. Avail of mystery shopping services from trusted companies to get impactful results and drive behavioral change across your business.
