Introducing Secret Mystery Shopping

    Secret mystery shopping is not a new concept combining the aspects of shopping secretly or mysteriously, but simply another nomenclature of shopping anonymously or without revealing the true identity. It is a market research technique that is employed to judge the customer satisfaction with respect to customer relationship. This technique is gaining popularity because it has been effective in almost graphically determining the level of customer satisfaction. This had proved to be very useful for the companies involved in client service to model or remodel their service according to the popularity or unpopularity measured with this technique.

    There are many companies that provide secret mystery shopping services to the companies involved in client service. These companies may include the retail stores, car servicing or any other servicing centers, hospitality oriented companies like hotels, restaurants and spas, banks and financial institutions, and any other establishments you can think of where the whole business centers around one-to-one interaction with the customer. If you take a closer look at the growing industries you will find that the foremost among them is service industry. People are getting more and more service in exchange of money. Everything from the telephone operators to store down the block fit the description of a service. Since this is an emerging industry more and more investors are getting attracted to it. The competition is also increasing accordingly.

    In any business competition is normal. But now, like all things going the extreme way, competition has become cut throat. So to stay ahead, a company has to be very careful that they do not go out of the popularity chart of the customers. They have devices to check their own performance which are stringent and there are a number of strict guidelines for the employees who interact directly with the customers. But any inspection by the in-house team of experts may reveal only a portion of the picture. The whole truth can never be revealed. So after all these checks the company can still lose on profits and popularity. The employees can act differently under the controlled conditions. No employee would be foolish enough to lose his job by annoying an inspector sent in by the parent company. In such a condition the most effective tool has been found to be secret mystery shopping .

    It is not always true that all the employees are bad and secret mystery shopping is carried out to identify the blots in the business. This technique is also used to reward the employees who seem to have a role in boosting business. But they do not know who is responsible for their reward. Yes, the first condition of the special shoppers is to stay incognito. The effect of such techniques reveals almost the real situation because the shoppers are not different from the regular shoppers apart from the fact that they report their observation while the regular shoppers do not. The employees stay in their regular attitude and treat the special shopper as any other person. This helps the special shopper to carefully study the situation and observe various aspects like courtesy, knowledge of the products, and helpfulness of the staffs. They also observe the decor of the store, the display of articles and availability and the time taken for the whole service from entering the store to exit. All these goes in the report generated through secret mystery shopping and eventually hands over a vital tool for the companies to act on to become the leader of the pack.