6 Benefits of Mystery Shopping for Retailers

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Most companies are opting to offer excellent service to stay a class above the rest due to the market’s competitive nature. According to Business Wire, 70% of Americans are willing to spend 13% more on businesses they believe offer extraordinary customer service. For most brands, offering excellent customer service may be a tall order due to the challenge of gaining constant, unbiased knowledge and understanding of how consumers see your brand.

You are mistaken if you think your company requires more clients to get incredible profit. In general, you need returning customers. Are your consumers willing to skip your cheap competitors and return to your products or services? Mystery shopping is a beneficial tool that assists know how to get returning consumers. It offers countless benefits, and here are the top six.

1. An Overview of Mystery Shopping

You may be wondering, “what is mystery shopping?” It is a strategy commonly utilized by market research, consumer watchdogs, and retailers to assess the quality of customers in businesses and collect crucial data regarding products and service delivery. Companies have to hire mystery shoppers who suit the target customer profile, offer them a questionnaire to record their experience, and train them on how to assess various parameters. Afterward, mystery shoppers need to visit the physical location or make a call to the business while pretending to be a customer and make detailed notes of the things they have been inquired to assess. The company later analyzes this information to enhance customer experience.

2. Increase Sales

One of the leading benefits of mystery shopping is to offer information about your company’s selling process. Mystery’s shopper’s experience can provide insight on how you can sell more products, change the products’ layout in the store, identify the pleasant and unpleasant products, or recognize how the sales team selling tactics affected their wish to make a buy.

3. Assess Your Competitors

You should continually examine how your business is doing against the competition if you want to succeed. The best thing about mystery shopping is that it lets you check your competitors’ performances. You can effortlessly check their staff behavior and daily operations and observe how customers respond to their brand. Identifying your rival’s strengths and weaknesses can help you make well-informed decisions. For example, if you find out that your competitor is constantly short of a specific product loved by customers, you should consider overstocking that item in your store.

4. Get an Insight into Your Employee Behavior

Perhaps, you have spent a lot of time and energy acquainting your staff with the standard operating procedure for various environments. But how can you know that they use these procedures? You don’t have to get feedback from enraged consumers to take action. Mystery shopping gives you an insight into your employees' performance and lets you determine whether their services meet the brand’s expectations.

5. Get a Proficient Point of View

Remember that the observations you get from mystery shoppers aren’t individual results. Mystery shoppers have profound knowledge about customer shopping behavior based on their respective demographic categories and target audience. As a result, they know how a company can excel from a consumer’s perspective. Furthermore, mystery shopping is unbiased, meaning you get precise and neutral data.

6. Examine New Products and Services

Have you ever run into a scenario where you believed your products and services would be the next big in the industry, only for the numbers to remain the same for several weeks or months? Well, your products or services could be stalling due to many reasons. Probably, you have not met the clients’ expectations, or the employees aren’t following the given procedure. Fortunately, you can incorporate mystery shopping to recognize where you got it wrong by examining the customers’ perspectives.

7. Enhanced Client Retention

Client retention needs to be the main reason for including mystery shopping in your business. All the enhancements you initiate in your company due to actionable insights gained from mystery shopping result in excellent customer service. In the end, customers will prefer your company over the competitors.

Is Mystery Shopping Beneficial for Retailers?

To simply put it, yes. The data you get from mystery shopping is priceless, irrespective of whether you sell your products online, in-store, or via the phone. The information allows you to channel your delivery to align with your customers’ expectations. Your customers will be content if the experience surpasses their expectations.