Mystery Shopping Companies | Secret Shopper Companies

Why Mystery Shopping?

Reputable secret shopping companies use mystery shopping programs to highlight areas in need of improvement in business performance and processes. Knowing where the problems are is the first step to fixing them and soaring past your competition.

Among other things, mystery Shopping can help:

increase customer service performance

improve sales levels

improve customer satisfaction

increase employee motivation

protect brand equity

improve communication

What is Mystery Shopping?

Mystery shopping is our core competency. In a nutshell, mystery shopping is a market research a tool where people observe the quality of products and/or services while acting like a regular customer. This information is then collated and analysed to create actionable insights.

Also called ‘secret shopping’, ‘research shopping’, or ‘mystery consumer research’, mystery shopping is a qualitative and quantitative tool allowing business to experience their own processes, products and services from the perspective of their customers.

Mystery shopping can be adapted to many different industries that offer a service or a product. Mystery shopper services are performed all the time for hotels, airlines, restaurants, and retail shops. Some secret shopping companies choose to specialize in one or two specific industries; AQ has broad experience across several industries – automotive, finance, fashion, retail, to name a few.

Why Choose AQ?

Since our founding in 2001, AQ has honed its skills as a global mystery shopping company. After more than 15 years we have multiple offices around the world with global reach and local roots. We chose to specialize in mystery shopping and mystery audits because we believe it’s important to focus on meeting our clients’ needs. We have helped scores of brands improve their frontlines across a variety of industries, and always, at the core, we let our passion for great customer service drive us to help our clients achieve their goals.

What AQ can do for you:

Develop a customized and measurable mystery shopping and audit programs aimed at helping your company isolate the areas in need of improvement.

Deliver actionable insights and solid reporting to allow you to deal with any problem areas swiftly and efficiently.

Help you strategize on the best tactics to propel your company forward into the future.

Selection of Shoppers

AQ takes great care in selecting and screening our shoppers to ensure that they match your customer profile. We keep records of all of our mystery shoppers and have them sign confidentiality, quality and integrity agreements for every job, every time.

We have mystery shoppers to match any kind of requirement, for any business or industry. Our skilled and experienced shoppers can perform basic and straight-out observational reporting while maintaining a scenario, or review specific facets of your operations. We send frequent travelers to assess flight services or duty free stores, businessmen to assess hotels or private banking branches, high-end consumers to assess luxury brands or automotive branches, or families to assess entertainment parks, retail outlets and restaurants. The diversity of our clients means that we maintain and manage a very large pool of qualified and dedicated shoppers.

Mystery shopper training

Each client and program is different. As a result, so is our training for shoppers. As a minimum, all our mystery shoppers must do the following:

Study a detailed briefing manual that has been developed specifically for your program.
Pass an online ‘comprehension’ test, which is tailored to your program.
Attend a face-to-face training at one of our offices or attend a one-on-one phone and web briefing.

We make sure our shoppers know you before they start working with you. Not only must they be familiar with the survey and the scenario, but also with your company and the program’s objectives.

Debriefing sessions

Our trained specialists will assess your retail performance and provide you with constructive and actionable feedback through their mystery reports. Maintaining neutrality, they consciously and critically observe your front line, backed by their extensive consumer experience in relevant industries.

A debriefing by our specialists is essentially a focused session for you to ask them more in-depth questions about your brand, your retail performance or even plans for the future. Guided by our senior managers, the session provides you with further insights from a group of professional consumers and observers.