4 Ways Mystery Shopping Can Help Your Business

1. 4 Ways Mystery Shopping Can Help Your Business Customers are the lifeblood of any business. Providing a positive experience and maintaining a good brand image keeps them happy and ensures repeat business. While there are many ways to achieve customer satisfaction, mystery shoppingis definitely reliable because the feedback is unbiased, direct and customized. Here are a few ways it helps improves your business: 1.Competitor Analysis: What are your competitors doing? And how are they promoting it? What do they do differently? Mystery shoppinggives you a better idea of your competitors, including their pricing structure, their USP and their weaknesses. You also get to look for a niche that could give your business an advantage when compared to others. There are many alternatives to mystery shopping for a competitor analysis, but they’re generally based on guesswork. For example: your top brass could debate what competitors are doing differently, but they could end up completely missing the target. Secret shopper companiescan help you create a customized program that erases uncertainty and looks for the little details that add value to your research. 2.Understanding the Customer’s Perspective: Many factors can create a gap between the customer experience you provide and the customer’s actual perception of your performance. It could be a knowledge gap wherein you do not understand the client’s needs and wants. Or, it could occur when employees fail to deliver a service quality that’s well specified. Sometimes there’s a disconnect between business delivery and services promised via advertising and marketing. Identifying, understanding and resolving these gaps can make or break a business. Mystery shopping companiescan help businesses address this gap and change the way they engage with customers. 3.Review Internal Policy: Mystery shopping can be an eye-opening experience for businesses who seem to be stuck in active inertia – a condition that the Harvard Business Review defines as a tendency to follow established patterns of behavior, even when faced with crisis. Using the results of the survey, companies can detect existing deficiencies and make necessary changes. It can also give companies insight into what to look for in potential employees. The customer-client gap that we discussed earlier can also be used to look for flaws in the training module and serve as an opportunity to overhaul its training procedures. 4.Measure Compliance: Noncompliance of government mandated laws and industry established benchmarks can be the death knell for companies, especially those in the medical, financial and food sectors.

2. Mystery shopper companies can be hired for compliance auditing to make sure that mandated rules and regulations are met by staff. Essentially, mystery shopping can help companies avoid potential issues and look for areas where they need to improve business. Author Bio: The author specializes in mystery shopping. He also helps companies understand what is a secret shopperand how they can use them to deliver excellence.