Mystery Shopping Services: Five Things CMOs and COOs Need to Know

Mystery shopping can be just as mysterious as the shoppers themselves. You can sort of tell by the name what it involves. But with all the scams and less-than-reputable services out there, how do you know what’s a good mystery shopping service and what isn’t?

These are five things to look for when you’re hiring a mystery shopping service.

1. Your mystery shopping team should accessible by phone, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Shoppers are visiting your locations throughout the week, so your service should be available whenever you need them too. If you have an issue that a shopper needs to know about, you can let your service know about it beforehand.
2. A good mystery shopping service platform offers a dynamic database with real time updates. This means you see the results of your shop as soon as it’s posted (and since we’ve got 24/7 access to our service team, you can ask questions right away). Your data is colocated and secure, which means it’s safe and backed up. It can also provide highly granular reporting & analysis, as needed.
3. Our mystery shopping service reports can be customized. We don’t just give you pre-made templates, we will customize your reports to fit specific regions and locations, with visible and hide-able questions, depending on a location’s requirements. This will let you see the data you want to see, without wading through extra information you don’t need.
4. Our audio visual capability makes our shopping reports more informative, unambiguous, nuanced, actionable and trainable. Seeing body language and hearing vocal pitch, cadence and speed, with other mannerisms reveals much more than a mere textual report. A good shopping service will use the latest in audio and video recording technology, including miniature digital video recorders.
5. We offer more than customer service. We provide a deployable army to check that branding, signage and menus are correct. This saves clients the cost of sending an internal team to audit branding, signage and similar issues.

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