Maintaining quality service in one's business is a major challenge
for owners. There are many ways on ensuring that a set of criteria set
forth by management is met by one's employees and other service
providers, and one of them, while invented in the early 1940s, have
gained much more prominence in the years past.
Welcome to the world of mystery shopping
Mystery shopping was the standard practice of most companies in the United States in as early as 1940. The procedure was used as a common way to measure the integrity of one's employees, and to check if these same employees are following the guidelines made by higher management. Most assessments at the time involve simple questionnaires, which gradually evolved to complete audio and video recordings. Today, while secret shopping techniques are similar, usually, these involved modern equipment and are measured and interpreted by sophisticated analytical models.
Most industries, particularly service-oriented companies like hotels, supermarkets, fast food chains, restaurants, cinemas, banks, car showrooms, gas stations and even hospitals and other health care facilities use secret shopping as an effective way of maintaining the quality of their services. Most often than not, data from secret shopping provide feedback on customer service experience, thereby assessing areas for improvement in the given field being evaluated.
In Australia, companies like Retail mystery shopping Australia, Retail reality and Shadow Shopper, third-party professional services to perform mystery shopping for interested clients. Retail Reality promises an improvement of one's bottom line, after they evaluate your customers' needs via mystery shopping programs and performance reviews. Passion and customer service excellence is offered by Retail Mystery Shopping Australia. Shadow Shopper, on the other hand, tailor makes their programs, saying that because €every business is different€, they create unique programs for your business €to identify and measure key touch points in the customer experience€.
But regardless of who you hire, the basic techniques of mystery shopping are common for all market research companies. When a client company hires a company providing mystery shopping services, that company will study the client company's background, quality service requirements and draw upon a valid survey model that lists all necessary information and improvement factors the client wants to measure. This information are then incorporated to survey materials, instruments and other relevant documents and assigned to third party's staff. Typical details include the name of employees assigned to the area being evaluated, how many employees are in this area, the type of products and/ or service this area is offering to its customers, how they deal with different types of customers, the speed of service, the cleanliness and orderliness of the area and the overall compliance of the employees evaluated relating to company rules and other pertinent regulations.
After the visit, the secret shopper assigned to the task will review and analyze the information he has gathered, commenting and making a formal report via quantitative and qualitative statistical models used by the secret shopping company. This will allow for a concrete and measurable means of improvement, either for internal use or as criteria for comparing similar businesses.
Welcome to the world of mystery shopping
Mystery shopping was the standard practice of most companies in the United States in as early as 1940. The procedure was used as a common way to measure the integrity of one's employees, and to check if these same employees are following the guidelines made by higher management. Most assessments at the time involve simple questionnaires, which gradually evolved to complete audio and video recordings. Today, while secret shopping techniques are similar, usually, these involved modern equipment and are measured and interpreted by sophisticated analytical models.
Most industries, particularly service-oriented companies like hotels, supermarkets, fast food chains, restaurants, cinemas, banks, car showrooms, gas stations and even hospitals and other health care facilities use secret shopping as an effective way of maintaining the quality of their services. Most often than not, data from secret shopping provide feedback on customer service experience, thereby assessing areas for improvement in the given field being evaluated.
In Australia, companies like Retail mystery shopping Australia, Retail reality and Shadow Shopper, third-party professional services to perform mystery shopping for interested clients. Retail Reality promises an improvement of one's bottom line, after they evaluate your customers' needs via mystery shopping programs and performance reviews. Passion and customer service excellence is offered by Retail Mystery Shopping Australia. Shadow Shopper, on the other hand, tailor makes their programs, saying that because €every business is different€, they create unique programs for your business €to identify and measure key touch points in the customer experience€.
But regardless of who you hire, the basic techniques of mystery shopping are common for all market research companies. When a client company hires a company providing mystery shopping services, that company will study the client company's background, quality service requirements and draw upon a valid survey model that lists all necessary information and improvement factors the client wants to measure. This information are then incorporated to survey materials, instruments and other relevant documents and assigned to third party's staff. Typical details include the name of employees assigned to the area being evaluated, how many employees are in this area, the type of products and/ or service this area is offering to its customers, how they deal with different types of customers, the speed of service, the cleanliness and orderliness of the area and the overall compliance of the employees evaluated relating to company rules and other pertinent regulations.
After the visit, the secret shopper assigned to the task will review and analyze the information he has gathered, commenting and making a formal report via quantitative and qualitative statistical models used by the secret shopping company. This will allow for a concrete and measurable means of improvement, either for internal use or as criteria for comparing similar businesses.
