Mystery Shops are a great way to capture specific feedback through a series of carefully designed questions to ensure you are obtaining the information you need to make informed decisions about your brand standards and training procedures. A traditional mystery shop usually aims to review service, timing, cleanliness, product quality, and management presence and these types of mystery shops provide a snapshot of how your business performs from the customer’s perspective. However, in today’s mystery shop landscape, we are seeing more and more unconventional mystery shops that are targeting very specific areas that seek to obtain data in new ways that put more emphasis on one given area of their business. Some examples of these targeted shops are below.
*Franchise Compliance
For clients that are set up in a franchise model, it can be challenging to ensure that all locations are checking all the boxes in terms of what the expectations are when running a store under their brand. Franchise compliance shops can consist of a lot of different items to verify, but we primarily see these shops capturing feedback on communication, and wait times and ensuring that the location is using properly branded materials that are required by corporate. For example, if it’s a requirement that the store uses company-branded napkins, but the store has taken a shortcut and is using white, non-descript napkins, this is something our shoppers would be on the lookout for, and they would be instructed to take a photo of anything we had advised them on that was non-compliant.
*Marketing
Clients will utilize these types of shops if they are looking to obtain information about how a certain product is being marketed within their stores. It could be a new product that they are introducing, and they want to ensure that their staff is promoting, serving, and charging for it in the proper manner. These shops usually consist of 10-20 questions and require the shopper to ask about and order a specific item. The shopper would then provide details as to how it was promoted, photos of any marketing material they viewed, and feedback on the overall quality.
*Loss Prevention
These types of shops are used when a client is worried about theft and wants a better understanding of the cash and product handling behaviors within their stores. Our shoppers are trained to observe cash handling procedures, interactions with customers, and overall store security practices. These shops provide a lot of insight into loss prevention and benefit clients by helping them identify areas for training improvement and overall security practices.
*Process Confidence
Our clients want to ensure that their staff members are following the service standards they have set forth within their business. To do this, we can set up shops that specifically target a list of service standards to ensure that employees are delivering. This can include service timing, proper upselling practices, and product knowledge among others.
While there is still a lot of value to be had in conducting the traditional, all-inclusive mystery shops that will cover multiple facets of the customer experience, we do believe that these ultra-specific types of shops can also provide helpful and useful information that is more tailored to the one area of your business. If you are interested in learning more about the other types of shops we offer, please don’t hesitate to let us know.