Mystery shoppers are people who visit a store and evaluate the overall performance of the employees who serve them. The mystery shopper goes in pretending to be a simple shopper, visiting the store for the purpose of purchasing an item. This shopper is either employed by the store or an external company and is responsible for assessing the employee performance and submitting a report. Sometimes a mystery customer will be required to secretly film their exchange which could be done using a Body Worn Camera. For more information, visit http://www.pinnacleresponse.com/body-cameras-and-the-law/.
There are no specific requirements that are essential to becoming a mystery shopper, as you don’t need to hold a certain appearance, qualification or manner, you’re job is to simply blend in with all of the other shoppers. Those who hold a massive flair and passion for the field will enhance the levels of customer service in the store and these people are highly sought after in the service.
Being a mystery shopper is a lot of fun if you can act normally and not give the game away but it’s good to remember that mystery shopping is still a serious business in the quest for company’s to improve their customer service and staff training. The whole process is structured to aid the service of stores around the world. Some traits that you should be able to demonstrate include reliability, professionalism and be trustworthy. Also having your own transportation, good literacy skills and a good memory will be useful if you want to get involved in mystery shopping.
The importance of using mystery shopping is that stores can massively boost their sales by improving their levels of customer satisfaction through improved customer service. Mystery shoppers are hired in order to increase the sales of the store by giving employees feedback on how to improve their performance. The service is not only useful for evaluating the performance of the staff, it’s also crucial for seeing what the service is like to customers from their business rivals. You can compare the two levels of customer service to find areas that need improvement or changing. Problems can be fixed quicker this way, increasing the number of customers visiting the store through word of mouth recommendations, which in turn boosts the sales for the businesses nationwide.
Before considering hiring a mystery shopping service, you should take a look at the existing level of service that’s already in place. This should help to provide you with ideas into what exactly needs improving in your business. Doing your own research is good preparation before using a mystery shopping service and you can compare your results afterwards to see if they match. Be sure not to tell any employees about the upcoming mystery visit as doing so could affect the results and may even set your employees on edge so they don’t behave as they normally would. Causing inaccuracies in the findings will mean that the exercise was pointless and you won’t learn much of any use.