As your business continues to grow, you dedicate more of your time to its daily operation. This would normally include a lot of paperwork and meetings with stakeholders that may cause you to pay less attention to the quality of your products and services.
When you continually encounter a drop in sales from one month to the next, you would naturally try your best to identify its cause. However, reevaluating your store on your own may not be as representative of reality as you would want it to be. That is why many business owners today hire a mystery shopper to review their store and offer an unbiased opinion.
What is a mystery shopper?
A mystery shopper, sometimes called a secret shopper or research marketer, visits a business, typically a store, to experience being a “customer” and later on rate and write honest feedback about it. They will narrate their experience from the moment they walk into the store to the moment they walk out and present this in a report.
They are usually financially compensated. If not, they receive a refund for all the costs they had incurred during their visit.
Reasons to Hire a Mystery Shopper
Many business owners or managers hire a mystery shopper company to help them see and improve their overall business performance. This is because the perspective of a customer is relatively different from their perspective.
With that said, here are the reasons why you should get a mystery shopper to visit your store:
1. A mystery shopper gives honest feedbacks
A research marketer needs to have no affiliation with the company they are working with. They should not have investments, relationships, and connections to any of the business owners, managers, or staff.
That ensures that the company will receive an unbiased and honest report from them. Since they are not affiliated with the company, they can review the store based on its customer service and the quality of its goods.
2. Their report can help improve your products
Back in the early stages of your business, you were probably so focused and dedicated to producing the highest-quality product. However, as your company grew, you became busy with handling the “business” side of your company. You spent so much time on paperwork that you forgot to continually check whether your products were still at their best.
As much as you want to review your products yourself, you can’t deny that you may be biased towards them.
That is why many business owners and managers hire a mystery shopper to visit their store to get real and honest feedback. Their report significantly helps reevaluate products and improve the sales performance of your businesses.
A mystery shopper will evaluate your store product according to its:
- Quality
- Presentation
- Service
- Value
- Appeal
3. Their report can help better your customer service
Aside from the quality of your product, customer service is one of the essential factors of marketing your products and keeping new and loyal customers. No matter how high-quality your products are, store visitors will avoid going back to your store if your employees are not dedicated to their job or disrespectful.
That is why you should hire a mystery shopper company to review and help improve employees’ performance in your store.
A mystery shopper can write an honest and unbiased review about:
- How the security guard or greeting employee welcomed them
- How the service crew attended to their needs
- How the cashier treated them
- How the sales employees marketed your products to them
- How their purchases were packaged
Conclusion
A mystery shopper is someone who can give you an honest review of your products and store service. Their written report will help you reevaluate and improve your sales and employees’ performance.
If you want to hire a mystery shopper company, get in touch with us today. Our professional mystery shoppers are dedicated to helping businesses improve customer service and products by giving honest and unbiased reviews.
