Transforming Mystery Shopping Insights into Better Business
Mystery shopping insights come from great mystery shopping programs and can provide in depth analysis of any business situation. Whether the program is aimed at employee training, compliance factors, or specific customer service aspects, the insights a good MSP offers are vital to business growth.
By understanding and analyzing mystery shopping insights, a company can learn about how best to deliver on its brand promises and improve customer satisfaction.
How to get good mystery shopping insights?
Any data is only as good as the methodology that captured it. So how can you assure that your mystery shopping program is going to give you the insights you need to improve.
Know your Targets
Mystery shopping can measure a wide variety of things, so it’s important to set out with a clear goal in mind. What are you looking to investigate with your program? What sort of data is going to offer the insight you need?
Build the Right Program
Once you’ve established the goal, it’s time to construct the right kind of mystery shopping program that’s going to deliver the data that you need. Most companies don’t have the experience to do this themselves, which is where an experienced mystery shopping provider comes in to help. To get the right kinds of mystery shopping insights, you’re going to need to ask the right kinds of questions in the right way without getting lost in the woods.
Understand the Data
Once your program is up and running and those mystery shopping insights are coming in, it’s important to know what you’re looking at. Data can come in all shapes and sizes, as charts or text, and it’s easy to get confused or misread it. Most experienced mystery shopping companies can do the analysis for you, delivering your mystery shopping insights in clear, neat analyses that will help you get to the root of the issues quickly.
What to do with good mystery shopping insights?
Once you’ve got those neatly analyzed mystery shopping insights, it’s time to put them to use. Transforming mystery shopping insights into actual sales means using them to improve things, among which customer satisfaction is key.
Something isn’t working…
Data analysis and its corresponding insight might reveal that something isn’t up to scratch in the company as a whole, or in a specific store. If it’s company-wide then it’s time to take a serious look at whatever it is that isn’t working – maybe that new system update is make life a lot less user-friendly than you’d intended. If it’s a specific store or region then you can use the mystery shopping program insights to narrow in on the location and address the problem head on – maybe it’s a staffing or managerial issue, or some form of cultural aspect means your latest training method hasn’t quite done what you wanted it to.
Your customers hate/love something…
Aside from giving you a better understanding of what’s working and not, mystery shopping insights can give you a heads up about things that customers are enjoying (or not). It’s important to understand how customers react to certain things. For example, if you’ve recently brought out a new promotion and one of the things you’re getting your staff to do is to highlight the promotion five times during any conversation with a customer, a mystery shopper can be asked to indicate if, firstly, the sales rep actually did mention it five times, and whether they found it an effective use of the conversation. (I guarantee that five times is likely to be excessive, depending on the length of the conversation!)
In situ differs from paper strategies…
You may have had the most brilliant sales and marketing strategies in the world. On paper. But there is no way of knowing exactly how those strategies are going to play out in the real world. Variations and adaptations might be needed depending on the location of the stores, or maybe it’s just not going quite according to plan because staff hasn’t understood the training. Mystery shopping insights can help you identify how well your strategies are working, or not, and allow you to take immediate action.
At the end of the day, business is a shifting thing: strategy needs to be able to adapt to changing circumstances when more information becomes available. Mystery shopping insights can be part of any strategy you make, helping guide you to make better decisions and grow your company in the right direction.
