A person who poses as a customer of a company to analyze the quality of customer service and the purchasing experience is known as a mystery shopper. During this performance, this professional carries out normal activities that a typical client could perform since his objective is to test the equipment to see its performance in the face of a real visit. However, companies can ask this mystery shopper to perform specific actions to evaluate specific situations of the customer experience.
The mystery shopping technique is used by companies themselves to test their customer service professionals, as well as their employees, and ensure that they are doing the job well and comply with established standards. Not only that, it is also common for companies to use this strategy to carry out a competitive analysis and see what their closest competitors are doing with the aim of learning from them.
In that sense, it is also common for mystery shoppers, after carrying out the covert analysis, to provide the company with a report on their experience.
Functions of a Mystery Shopper
A mystery shopper can carry out their work both in a physical store and by calling customer service remotely. In any case, as a general rule, this professional carries out normal actions that real clients perform on a daily basis, such as:
- Buy a product.
- Ask questions.
- Complain about something.
- Behave in a specific way.
Prior to this action, the company has explained to this professional all the aspects that it wants to evaluate about its business and the action strategy; in this way, the mystery shopper can better carry out its work. In that sense, the company may want to know:
- The quality of customer service.
- The organization and cleaning of your premises.
- If your staff complies with established regulations and follows the processes.
- If your staff knows the characteristics of the products or services you sell.
- Their needs and their shortcomings.
After his interaction with the staff and his customer experience, the mystery customer carries out a qualitative analysis of the different variables that have been previously defined and submits his comments and observations in writing.
Skills and aptitudes of a Mystery Shopper
Some people are interested in the world of mystery shoppers. Still, not everyone is prepared to carry out this position since you must have a series of skills for the entire process to succeed:
- Written expression: After carrying out his intervention, the mystery shopper must write a report. This can be a test, but it is also very common for the company to ask the person to write down their experience, so they must be able to express their entire experience fluently, with the right words and precisely, as well as the specific aspects. That the brand demands.
- Sensitivity and appreciation for details: Although the mystery shopper pretends to be a normal client, inside, he must pay attention to everything that the most demanding client on the market would pay attention to in order to detect the greatest amount of details. Therefore, the professional must be a detail-oriented person who captures sensations that go beyond the verbal, such as gestures, looks, etc.
- Be decisive: Unexpected things are sure to happen during your intervention. The professional must face them in the best possible way without showing that he is acting.
- Knowing how to act: Although obviously, a mystery client does not have to be an actor, he must know how to fake the personality or profile that he has been asked to fulfil at that time so as not to raise suspicions.
- Impartiality: The chosen person must know how to put aside their personal opinions about the brand and not let them influence their final evaluation.
- Memory: The report must be written after the intervention in the business, so the mystery shopper must remember their customer experience well and forget as little information as possible.
On the other hand, a good mystery shopper must comply with a series of basic rules to carry out their work in the best possible way:
- Be honest: When making reports, you must stick to reality and not invent situations or experiences.
- Be professional: The person chosen to be a mystery shopper must comply with the guidelines established by the company (although there is always room for improvisation) and complete the work in the agreed time.
In addition to that, the most common thing is that mystery clients are independent professionals or people who do this work to earn extra income, so it is not common for the company to hire them as part of the team. This is because the company usually needs its services on a rather punctual basis and, in addition, this further guarantees its objectivity when carrying out the analysis.
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Benefits of using the Mystery Shopper for companies
- It is very useful for improving the customer experience, which can bring great benefits in the form of more sales and a higher loyalty rate.
- It allows you to ensure that the knowledge of customer service and sales professionals about the product or service they are selling is adequate or if it is necessary to implement it, as well as improve equipment selection processes.
- It helps to make sure that the brand image you want to convey is reaching users.
- Mystery customers can also help detect specific problems that had not even been taken into account when carrying out the action strategy.
- It is useful to have an objective vision of the business since, many times, the professionals who work day to day in the company may have a more distorted and subjective vision of it.
- It can be part of a competitive analysis to understand how similar brands act and learn from them.
Challenges in implementing the Mystery Shopper method
The biggest challenge that companies have to face when using the services of mystery clients is for them to be recognized by a member of the staff who is serving them. This, of course, is more common when the intervention is done in a physical store than when it is done over the phone.
Although the chances of this happening cannot be reduced to zero, they can be considerably reduced by choosing people who have never visited that store or bought anything in it and also who do not have family or friends working in that company.
