How Mystery Shopping Works
Who and What are Mystery Shoppers?
Mystery Shoppers are normal individuals from various walks of life who have signed up to become mystery shoppers for a myriad of reasons. Some are looking to earn extra pocket money, others are deeply interested in improving customer service, many want to make a tangible difference, and there are those who relish the opportunity to try new things, among many other motivations.
Anyone can become a mystery shopper. We specifically choose not to train people in a way that might introduce bias, ensuring they report on their experiences as naturally and authentically as possible.
Their role is critical in offering unbiased, actionable insights that help businesses see their operations from the customer’s perspective. By mimicking genuine customer behaviour, Mystery Shoppers provide a clear picture of the customer experience, helping to uncover real opportunities for improvement, celebrate staff excellence, and ensure compliance with industry standards and regulations.
Our aim is to collaborate with as many mystery shoppers as possible to ensure we can provide a service that is as close to the customer perspective for each client and collect a broad spectrum of viewpoints. This approach allows us to offer tailored, industry-specific evaluations across a wide range of sectors including retail, hospitality, healthcare, education, transport, government services, and more, through various channels such as in-person visits, online shopping and website, social media and telephone enquiries.
Their feedback is invaluable for strategies aimed at enhancing customer satisfaction, fostering loyalty, and achieving operational excellence, ultimately driving success and growth in today’s competitive environment.
Collaboration
Working in Partnership
Personalised Service
Providing a personalised service is a very important part of our company ethos; by working closely with clients, we can ensure each programme is designed to fit around the company model and its objectives.
By working with us, you won’t just find out what needs fixing, you will have a programme which will change staff behaviour and fix the issues highlighted.
All programmes include:
- An opportunity to be involved in key decisions during programme design.
- A project manager with relevant industry experience.
- A dedicated project team from design to delivery.
- Regular updates from the team and regular review meetings.
Test Compliance
Competitor Analysis & Pricing Insight
Assess Customer Experience
Reward Teams
Embed Company Training
Drive Positive Behaviours
Ensure Brand Consistency
Product Testing
Test Social Media Responses
Flexible Solutions
It’s not just shopping
Mystery shopping is a hugely versatile tool; not only is it an objective way of measuring business performance, it also in itself drives positive behaviours amongst teams.
Mystery shopping provides the insight into the customer experience and is also the solution to improving it.
It works for any product or service in any industry; whether it’s transport, medical or business.
We have over 350,000 mystery shoppers all over the world meeting a huge range of demographics, enabling us to match your typical customer profile and provide more in-depth feedback as a result.
We will want to hear and understand more about your business, improvement objectives and customer experience goals.
Programme Design
We believe that the design phase is the foundation of a successful programme.
In order for us to guarantee its success, we will want to really understand a typical customer’s journey to ensure we capture insight on all the necessary touchpoints.
We will design the programme methodology and assessment forms to gather the data required to meet programme objectives.
The most successful programmes are those where staff have been fully consulted and – ideally – involved in designing the assessment forms against which they will be measured. We can provide help, guides and materials to support this taking place.
01
Recruit
Between 50-100 people sign up to our panel every single day and we ask them a range of questions to build their “shopper profile”.
02
Brief
Mystery shoppers are provided with a comprehensive brief detailing the requirements before their assessment.
03
Assess
Shoppers complete their assessment using our free mobile app, allowing data to be collected in real-time whilst remaining covert.
Use on PC or Mobile App
Generate Trend Charts
Review Most Common Answers and Comments
Highlight Attention Areas
Analyse by Question
Embed Company Training into the Assessments
Coaching Plan Dashboard
Print, View, PDF or Email Assessment Forms
Unlimited Users with Tiered Access
Reporting Results
Actionable Data
The programme itself will be designed to encourage performance improvement amongst your teams and we will work with you until you achieve and exceed your customer experience goals!
View all your Mystery Shopping data in one convenient place with access to our industry-leading reporting software, MSL Online.
To complement your web-based reporting, our team of Data Analysts and customer experience experts can create bespoke reports to meet your requirements and match your company branding.
Face to Face
(Including Video and Audio)
Telephone
(Including Recorded Calls)
Website
Social Media
Live Chat
Live Call Monitoring
Real Customer Feedback
TellUsFirst
Benchmarking
Auditing (Overt and Covert)
find out more
Request Information
If you’re looking to improve the success and service of your business, then provide us with a little bit of information on what you are looking to achieve and we’ll get back to you.