Mysterious Concept of Mystery Shopping

by Deepak Raj Digital Marketing Executavie

These days there are a lot of companies doing mystery shopping for the purpose of external market research for organizations of the particular market. For any organization, customer value is of utmost importance. Hence organizations employ mystery shopping companies to conduct and extensive research about the organization’s customer services, quality, personnel or operations, discreetly and professionally.

How Does It Work?

Mystery Shopping is mysterious because the service evaluators associated with the mystery shopping companies are supposed to carry out evaluations objectively without drawing attention to themselves or causing the employees to treat them different than other customers. They are sent to an outlet to purchase products or services as applicable, observe all details minutely and make note of every specific elements of the entire experience with the employees, products and services.

Relevance Of Mystery Shopping

Mystery shopping companies in Delhi offer varied services in mystery auditing. Drawing up a survey model agreed upon by the client organization is the first step towards it. Survey instruments and assignments are created and allocated with registered mystery shoppers. The mystery shoppers are instructed to make typical transactions as a test of the customer skills and servicing knowledge of employees in a stringent and specific to service issue manner.

Most popular details and information reported by mystery shoppers are number of employees, greetings given to customers or not, types of product displayed and brought out for the customer’s requirement, sales arguments used by employees, how the sales closure was attempted, add on sales offered, cleanliness of store, speed of service and compliance with company standards relating to service, store appearance, aesthetics and presentation. They also check for commercial aspects of stores like price, availability, and quality of the product; customer service via websites, telephones and in person; and housekeeping.>

The shopper submits this research data back to the mystery shopping company, which reviews and analyzes the information, completing quantitative or qualitative statistical analysis reports on the data for the client company. On the basis of this report previous standards are evaluated and benchmarks created and if required standards are altered for better performance of the company at large.

Traits of Mystery Shoppers

Mystery shopping, although sounds interesting with a behind – the – hood shopping spree kind of experience, comes in with a great deal of responsibility. There are certain innate traits within a person that would be helpful in becoming a secret shopper, like being trustworthy, reliable and most importantly, mature and responsible. Apart from these personal traits, they should have good writing skills, a clear perspective of reporting and an unhindered judgement. They must be able to operate in a discreet secret manner so as not to draw attention towards them. It is very much similar to working as a secret agent seeking certain specific information.

Hiring Mystery shoppers is also an important task. One must make sure to check their background, experience and attitude towards this work. It would definitely not be a good investment if someone frequently blows the plan out during assignments. Mystery shopping, after all, is a profession these days like any other freelance profession, and a large number of Indian and multinational firms are hiring companies doing mystery shopping for a better understanding of internal operations.