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Getting Perspective — How Taking Images During a Mystery Shop Can Help You Gain Insight

Getting Perspective — How Taking Images During a Mystery Shop Can Help You Gain Insight

As they say, a picture tells 1,000 words — and since people are now taking more than 1.8 billion pictures per day, what’s a few more? 

In continuing with our series of recent posts regarding features of the most underused benefits of the 360 Relay mystery shopper program, here’s another one that stands out — photos. We have the ability to include required photos for mystery shops as well as internal audits simply and easily.

Photos: An Under-Utilized Feature for Mystery Shops and Audits 

Surprisingly, many of our clients don’t take full advantage of this option; however, there’s a variety of benefits:

Benefits of Images for Mystery Shops

Taking images during mystery shops provides powerful, practical, and actionable feedback into your business, product, and operations, including insight like:

  • Food presentation
  • Drink presentation
  • Restrooms
  • Exterior of the building
  • Products/merchandising
  • Display cases
  • Brochures
  • Business cards
  • Sales quotes
  • And more

As long as a customer can capture it without being completely obvious that they may be one of our national mystery shoppers, we strongly recommend including photos as much as possible. The pictures are embedded right in the shop reports, and there is a “media gallery” segment within the dashboard where you can log in to see a collection of every photo ever taken as well. For mystery shops, as long as you keep it to five or fewer required images per visit, you likely won’t see any change in price!

Benefits of Images for Internal Audits

For internal audits, we also can make photos required or optional for each question on the form. As an auditor, it is fast and easy to upload the pictures from your phone right onto the mobile app (assuming you have a strong internet connection). Just like the shops, these pictures will be embedded in the completed audit and also available in the “media gallery” on the dashboard. We recommend keeping each audit form under 30 photos for the best user experience. If you need additional images, we can separate the audit into multiple forms; the price per audit does not change based on the number of photos on the form.

At 360 Relay, we offer mystery shopping programs for just about every industry, including restaurants, retail, entertainment, services, higher education, and more. If you are interested in taking advantage of this feature, contact us to determine which photos you’d like to include in your mystery shops and/or audits moving forward!