In the first of our exclusive excerpts from The Secret Diary of a Mystery Shopper by Claire Boscq-Scott, the author debunks the myths – and explains the benefits – of mystery shoppers.
Measuring your customer service tells you where you are now and how you measure up against your competition. This important benchmark helps you to set your strategy for the future; there are many aspects of market research and one of the methods to measure customer service is mystery shopping.
Why, as a business, should you use mystery shopping to improve your customer experience?
Well it isn’t a difficult question to answer:
- you can’t be in your business 24/7
- you can’t be in 2, 3 or 20 places at once
- you can’t improve if you don’t get feedback
- you can’t celebrate success
- you can’t manage what you don’t measure
- you don’t know if you are following your business vision
So mystery shopping provides objective quantitative and qualitative feedback about your customer experience at one moment in time.
A mystery shopper is someone who has been trained specifically to go, anonymously, into a shop, restaurant, cinema, any business really which has contact with customers (which in my eyes, is every businesses), for the purpose of observing and measuring customer service, product quality and the environment of the establishment in general.
Before performing a visit, the shoppers are given details about what is expected of them, and the full questionnaire which they will need to fill in. Having understood the full briefing, the shoppers will then serve as the eyes and ears for the clients. After completing a visit, the shoppers will submit their evaluation in a detailed report.
Many mystery shopping companies publicise mystery shopping as an easy and fun thing to do: “Be paid to shop,” but this is far from true. Being a mystery shopper requires many qualities and is certainly a serious business. They will need to have an eye for details, be able to write quality reports and have a very good memory too.
I have been very lucky to have had an amazing team of just over eighty Mystery Shoppers, who were all professional, professionally trained and efficient. They could work within a retail or hospitality environment, call centres, or to the specific needs of financial services.
Join us next week, for the second of our exclusive excerpts from The Secret Diary of a Mystery Shopper.
The Secret Diary of a Mystery Shopper by Claire Boscq-Scott has its virtual launch on Wednesday 9 September and is available to purchase and download from amazon.co.uk.
