Mystery Shopping & Mystery Customers

Most people think that the terms Mystery Shopper and Mystery Customer are interchangeable, however IMS believe that there is an important difference between the two and will design and implement campaigns utilising carefully profiled and highly trained staff acting as Mystery Shoppers or Mystery Customers depending on your needs.

A crucial element of the sales process is to turn shoppers (browsing or maybe thinking of purchasing) into customers (who purchase and hopefully continue to purchase from your stores). Therefore for certain campaigns we will utilise a 'shopper' approach to test the ability of your staff to generate (rather than facilitate) sales.
 
However, once a shopper becomes a customer it is obviously important to ensure that they continue to purchase from your store. Therefore ensuring the highest standards of customer care is vital. For certain campaigns we may utilise a 'customer' approach to test the ability of your staff to service and retain your already valuable customers.
 
Mystery Shopping and Mystery Customer programmes, when used effectively, should not only measure your standards of service but should also help to improve your standards of service by actively encouraging staff to ensure they are taking the right approach every time. We believe that in order to achieve this you need a carrot as well as a stick:

• Our Mystery Shopping and Mystery Customer programmes ensure that scenarios are precisely and consistently tested with detailed, accurate results reported back in a timely fashion to enable you to take fast and appropriate corrective action where required.
• We also ensure that our Mystery Shopping and Mystery Customer programmes recognise outstanding service. In addition to the detailed visit level reports we can also produce engaging comparative reports that encourage healthy competition between staff and stores to achieve the highest levels of service.

In addition to helping to maximise your sales by increasing the levels of service that shoppers and customers receive, our Mystery Shopping and Mystery Customer programmes can help you increase efficiency by providing detailed information to allow you to effectively target your training resource. Mystery Shopping and Mystery Customer programmes can also help protect you by: 

• Measuring compliance with legal requirements (including using 18-20 year olds to test compliance to challenge 21 initiatives, or carefully profiled and highly trained staff to test Financial Services Authority compliance).
•  Measuring competitor performance, to ensure that your results are not analysed in isolation and that you have a clear picture of what is actually happening. 

Whatever your needs IMS will produce a Mystery Shopping or Mystery Customer campaign specifically based around these and we can deliver it using any of a variety of formats: 

• 'Traditional' Face to Face Mystery Shopping
• Online Mystery Shopping
• E-Mail Mystery Shopping
• Telephone Mystery Shopping
• 'Reveal' Mystery Shopping (where following the scenario our mystery shopper reveals the purpose of their visit, usually to provide instant reward & recognition for desired or outstanding levels of service)
• Audio recorded Mystery Shopping
• Video recorded Mystery Shopping

If you'd like to speak to our sales team about how we can provide you with an intelligent Mystery Shopping or Mystery Customer campaign based around your requirements, please click here.