Secret Shopping & Secret Customers

Mystery Shopping is sometimes refered to as Secret Shopping. Most people think that the terms Secret Shopper and Secret Customer are interchangeable, however we 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 Secret Shoppers or Secret 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 is obviously important to ensure that they continue to purchase from your store and so ensuring the highest standards of customer care is also vital. Therefore for certain campaigns we may utilise a 'customer' approach to test the ability of your staff to service and retain your already valuable customers.

Used correctly, Secret Shopping and Secret Customer programmes 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 Secret Shopping and Secret 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 Secret Shopping and Secret Customer programmes recognise outstanding service and in addition to the detailed visit level reports we can produce engaging comparative reports which 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 Secret Shopping and Secret Customer programmes can help you increase efficiency by providing detailed information to allow you to effectively target your training resource. In addition our Secret Shopping and Secret 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

Whatever your needs IMS will produce a Secret Shopping or Secret Customer campaign specifically for your needs and we can deliver it using any of a variety of formats:

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

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