What are the Benefits of Conducting Mystery Shopper Audits?

Many companies wonder what customers think when they walk into their stores, go through the purchasing process and leave with the items they purchased. Mystery shopping gives a company an inside look into the customer experience and provides it with a way to gauge customer satisfaction. This is extremely important when trying to find ways to innovate and grow a company’s customer base. Without the reports that mystery shoppers submit, companies would be missing out on important information about their business and they would have less of an idea as to how to improve.

Audit of Company’s Employees

Another important role that mystery shopping provides is an insight into how employees are interacting with customers. It can be difficult to know how employees conduct themselves when a manager or supervisor is not around. Mystery shoppers are tasked with interacting with specific employees and providing the company with the names of the people they interacted with. This helps to ensure that all of a store’s employees are conducting themselves in the right way and giving the customer the best experience possible.

Future Employees and Training

In addition to gaining information about current employees, mystery shopping can give a company insight as to what it should look for in future employees. The information received can also help companies improve their training processes by identifying areas where employees lacked skills or competencies.

 MYSTERY SHOPPER AUDIT

• Mystery shopper audits are unnerving and stressful if you know it is in progress. 

• This could prove to be an exceptionally stressful experience if by chance your team becomes aware that they are being audited, and your whole team and guests can pick up on the vibe.

• Therefore the mystery precursor to the shopper audit. It is imperative that employees are not aware that a mystery shopper audit is in progress. 

• As the owner of an establishment or an investor in a project, you want to receive an honest unbiased opinion of the performance.

• Alternatively, you can utilise the shopper audit to nitpick at specific standards that might not be met, or specific team members’ performance can be audited.

• As the client, you can structure the audit to suit your specific requirements.

• When you interview service providers ask to do a reference check and speak to two or three of their existing clients to get feedback on the success of their independent audits.

• Stick to the plain and simple and straightforward shoppers. People that will not stand out or become obvious as Mystery Shoppers.

• Do not supply your auditing company with vouchers or discounts, allow the course of a complete experience to be audited.

• Request that the full Bill delivery to the table is handed back in, completely with peppermints, toothpicks, and the waitrons message on the bill.

Every year thousands of companies pay mystery shoppers to go into their stores and conduct secret shopper audits to help the company get better at what it does. 

Mystery shoppers give an unbiased customer response to their experience. The information they provide to the company can then be used to help the company improve what it does in the future. It doesn’t matter what type of business it is, mystery shoppers work in many different industries. If a company deals directly with customers or clients, mystery shoppers can help to give insight as to how to improve.