Designing a better mystery shopping programme
Mystery shopping exists to alleviate an organisation’s concerns about consistently delivering a superior customer experience to their competitors, which has never been more critical or challenging than it is today.
When used effectively, mystery shopping research can be a powerful performance management tool that creates awareness around important standards or initiatives and drives organisational behaviour change—all in the spirit of better serving the customer.
But we find that mystery shopping methodology is often misused, and weak programme design is usually at the root of issues that cause poor return on investment.
Today, the applications go beyond checking compliance at brick-and-mortar locations to also better understand sales recommendations and test across all customer channels, leveraging new technologies to enhance capabilities.
Our seven steps for designing a better mystery shopping programme set out a blueprint for organisations with what needs to be put in place for better design, execution and impact of mystery shopping.
These include:
- Start with strategy
- Design with the customer in mind
- Define requirements
- Create realistic shopper scenarios
- Formulate a strategic sampling plan
