Mystery shopping and its importance for stores
Mystery shopping, also known as secret shopping, is the method
by which a store or a company evaluates its employees' performance.
In this a person in disguise pretends to be a shopper, visits
the store, interacts with the employees and assesses their ability
to build a rapport with the customer in order to sell their products.
That person is actually hired by the store owner or the company
proprietor to, assess the performance of employees and in the
end submit the report to the proprietor. The person hired is called
mystery shopper.
Apart from evaluation of performances, mystery shoppers analyze
other commercial aspects of retail stores. These aspects could
be price, availability, and quality of the product; customer service
via websites, telephones and in person; and house keeping. The
freelance professionals called secret shoppers then hand over
their assessment to the company head who actually hired them.
There are no essential requirements to be a secret shopper, as
shoppers don't have specific appearance or qualification. Those
who have a flair and passion to enhance the customer service and
the quality of the product can plunge into secret shopping. It
would be interesting to learn that the secret shoppers are paid
for their job. It is a profession just like any other profession.
Although the job entails shopping which is fun, mystery shopping
is a serious business and should be carefully dealt with. There
must be certain innate traits within a person that would be helpful
in being a secret shopper. These traits are the ability to act
or pretend, being trustworthy, reliable and professional. Apart
from all these, secret shoppers should have a better mode of transportation,
good writing skills and a clear perspective of actual reporting
and their personal opinion so that the truth is not tampered.
The stores make use of mystery shopping to uplift their sales
by improving customer satisfaction. Secret shoppers are hired
wholely and solely to increase sales by improving the performance
of the employees. Mystery shopping is useful not just for evaluating
the staff's performance but also for checking the customer service
offered by the rival business. It can be compared with one's own
customer service to find the problem areas. The problems can then
be rectified to increase the number of customers and hence the
sales.
Before hiring a mystery shopper make sure to inquire about the
services that the shopper has in hand, do the research well before
hiring. Conducting an audit of the employees is a tough job as
it is mandatory that they do not get prior information regarding
this exercise otherwise they will not present their true picture
at the time of scrutiny.
A store manager keeps a vigil on his employees while they deal
with the customers in person and over the phone. This often makes
the employees nervous and they become inadvertent under pressure.
Instead a mystery shopper brings out the true picture of the employees
as they perform naturally. This helps to locate the fault and
the drawbacks of each and every employee perfectly which subsequently
helps in improving customer satisfaction. Sometimes the customers
inquire about the products over the phone before coming to the
store. In this situation, the employee's ability to converse with
them over the phone, in order to convert the caller into a potential
customer, matters the most. To locate the faults of the employee,
some fake calls are required, and only a professional mystery
shopper can do it. A store can avail the same kind of services
provided by the companies for the product distribution and marketing.
Mystery shoppers are hired by the companies to find out what the
customers think about the new product that hits the market.
Mystery shoppers are known by many names like virtual customers,
evaluators in disguise and spotters but they solve only one purpose
of enhancing the customer service of a store and increasing its
sales.
