A mystery shopper is a person who has been hired to scrutinize products, customer services and employees of an organisation. It is been used externally by the watchdog organisations, market research companies or internally by the companies by themselves. It is done over the phone, in person or online. These people perform specific tasks such as asking questions, purchasing a product, provide detailed feedback or reports about their experience, registering complains or behaving in a certain way.
Benefits of a Mystery Shopper
1. Decreases the Cost of CRM: The data that are used for the CRM or Customer Relationship Management is often slow and expensive to aggregate. A mystery shopping service is an inexpensive and quick solution to this.
2. Benchmarking: The customer service representatives are the supporting pillars of the customer service. The poor performance by the representatives might have a great impact on the business. By these mysteries shopping service even the slightest setbacks can be identified and the performance of the representatives is catapulted above the competition.
3. Instant ROI: These shoppers are trained to identify non-compliance to train the best practices within a business. The process of the business is improved faster by the immediate feedback. If the turnaround is faster then it means the ROI is increased.
4. Adding Profits: The dissatisfaction of the customer is usually unknown by the company. This break in the process of communication comes from the fact that the customers who are unsatisfied are more likely to complain to their friends and family than to the company about their poor experience. This could occur in the business if the revenues of the business are not increasing and nobody knows the reason to it. The mystery shoppers are able to identify this break in communication.
5. Reaching Desired Results: The goals of the company can be measured in number of ways. One of the ways that is less ubiquitous in the world of the business is the instant feedback by the customers. The service of mystery shopping allows the company to measure the desired customer service results.
6. Detached: The company bias is been affected by the internal review of the customer service. A third party business evaluation of the business process is done by these mystery shoppers.
7. Professional Analysis: The mystery shopping service is done to evaluate the customer service of the business more effectively than the regular customer. Each of the shoppers is educated about the business and its best practices and it offer more effective and insightful help because of it.
8. Profitable: A business is successful because of the customer satisfaction. The mystery shopping programs are found to be an effective method to improve the customer plan of the business.
9. Solid Deliverable: Not only written programs are provided by the service of mystery shopping but the service process can also be recorded by both video and audio which provide you with complete understanding about the customer service plan.
10. Expanding Service: The use of mystery shopping services is increasing almost in every industry. Traditional areas like movie theaters, hotels, manufacturers, retail stores, restaurants and others hire mystery shopper for their business.