Travel and Leisure

Have you been receiving too many customer complaints recently about your business or employees? Are the sales on the decline? You may want to seek feedback on how your employees represent your business to customers and clients when you are not present to supervise their actions.

One of the best ways to test if customer complaints are genuine or if there are problems within your organisation that require tackling is through hiring a secret shopper from a mystery shopping company.

Follow up letters and comment cards do not always reveal the entire picture and majority of the customers do not like to fill out questionnaires.

To learn how well or how badly your employees are serving your customers, you can hire people known as mystery shoppers who can provide you with a detailed and in depth report of their shopping experience in your business establishment.

How does a Mystery Shopper Work?

There are many mystery shopping companies who train ordinary people in the art of secret shopping. You can hire a shopper from one of these companies and send them into your business establishment. This shopper's identity will be kept under wraps and he or she will pose as a regular customer just like every other buyer in the store.

The mystery shopper will browse through the store, purchase a few items, observe how your employees are handling business operations, whether they are offering excellent customer service or not and ask suitable questions. Then he will pay up and check out.

How can Mystery Shopping Help You?

You have to reimburse the mystery shopper of course, for the purchases he has made. But in return, he will tell you everything about his shopping experience and provide you with a complete report on customer handling, employee behaviour, problems that he noticed, issues that need to be fixed and anything else that he observed.

He will also rate his shopping experience. This way you can easily find out whether the customer complaints are indeed true and you can take necessary corrective measures to improve staff performance or fix the other issues that are bugging your business.

Industries It Serves

You can hire mystery shoppers for evaluating the staff performance of businesses in industries as varied as betting and pawn shops, scientific research and development, engineering, education, hospitals, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, healthcare sector, salons and spas, plumbing, medical and dental clinics, heavy equipment rental companies, airlines industry, finance industry, insurance industry, retail industry, housing and rented accommodation industry, hospitality industry (hotels, casinos, restaurants, fast food chains), food and beverage industry, car dealerships and any and every kind of small business.

Mystery shoppers can also test the alertness levels of an invigilator or shoplift for checking store security systems or pretend to be pensioners who wish to purchase insurance or a child buying alcohol.

In short, you can hire trained secret shoppers from reputable mystery shopping companies to evaluate your business operations and assess the performance of the staff.