Mystery shopper checklists are important tools to help businesses improve their customer service. These checklists help evaluators discreetly observe employees and assess their adherence to the company’s standard practices.
This article will discuss the importance of mystery shopper checklists and how to make one. We will also talk about how to perform audits and generate a comprehensive report on improving retail services.
What is a Mystery Shopper?
A mystery shopper is someone a company hires to act as a regular customer, but with the sole purpose of assessing the quality of customer service. Mystery shoppers are sometimes referred to as secret shoppers or mystery shopping evaluators.
What Does a Mystery Shopper Do?
The mystery shopper’s job is to provide feedback on their experience with the company, including both the good and the bad. This feedback can be used to help businesses identify areas where they need to improve. Generally, a mystery shopper discreetly visits commercial establishments, observes operations, interacts with the staff, makes and completes specific transactions, and submits a report to the employer.
Types of Mystery Shopping
Mystery shopping is a legitimate and well-accepted market research activity. For this reason, organizations typically outsource their secret shoppers from credible mystery shopping companies. The mystery shopper company will then provide the mystery shoppers to the client organization.
Depending on the scope and industry, there are different types of mystery shopping jobs in today’s marketplace:
Hotel Mystery Shopping
Often referred to as mystery guests, hotel mystery shoppers usually stay in hotels, motels, resorts, breakfasts, and spas. Their goal is to help hoteliers improve their fundamental processes such as check-in and check-out services, reservations, and bookings. In addition, mystery hotel guests also assess in-house facilities, such as the cleanliness of the rooms and the friendliness of the staff.
Restaurant Mystery Shopping
Food mystery shoppers, or mystery diners, visit restaurants to evaluate the quality of the food, service, and ambiance. They also provide feedback on how well the restaurant is managed. In some cases, mystery shoppers may be asked to provide specific information about their experience, such as what they ordered and how much they paid. Details of a secret shopper’s dining experience will help identify gaps in training needs, standardize restaurant standards, and improve their overall operations.
Retail Mystery Shopping
Retail mystery shoppers are used to evaluating customer service in a retail setting. They may be asked to assess the sales floor, dressing rooms, checkout area, and customer service desk. Mystery shoppers may also be asked to make a purchase and report on their experience. Retail mystery shoppers will provide valuable information to improve customer relationships on the frontline while increasing sales and customer retention.
Benefits of Mystery Shopping
With everything that’s been said so far, it’s no secret why mystery shopping can be beneficial to businesses. Here are some of the benefits that mystery shopping can provide:
- Gain Customer Feedback: Businesses can get multiple perspectives through a mystery shopper, such as what the customer likes and dislikes. This type of feedback is invaluable as it can help businesses make changes that will be well-received by their target market.
- Improve Employee Performance: mystery shopping can help identify training and development needs for employees. This, in turn, can lead to improved employee performance and customer satisfaction.
- Increase Sales and Profits: By improving employee performance and customer satisfaction, mystery shopping can help businesses increase sales and profits.
- Verify and Reinforce Policies: With effective mystery shopping, businesses can verify that employees follow their policies. This can help businesses avoid potential legal issues and reinforce the importance of following company policies.
- Check Your Competition: Comparing your business against your competitors is another benefit of mystery shopping. This information can help you make changes to stay ahead of the competition.
What is a Mystery Shopper Checklist?
A mystery shopper checklist is a tool that secret shoppers use to assess and record customer experience feedback. Companies and organizations use this type of checklist to conduct internal checks or competitive market research experiments. In addition, mystery shopper checklists help evaluate the performance of retail employees against a set of standards.
The mystery shopper checklist should be designed to cover all aspects of the customer experience, from the initial greeting to the final interaction. In addition, the checklist should also include questions about the cleanliness of the store, the knowledge of the staff, and the overall customer service experience.
What Should Your Mystery Shopping Checklist Contain?
The contents of a mystery shopping checklist will depend on the business and what they are looking to assess. It will also depend on the type of industry, as different industries will have different standards. However, some general items should be included in most mystery shopping checklists, such as the following:
- External and internal impression
- Employee friendliness and initiative
- Product presentation and inventory
- Cleanliness and orderliness
- Advertising and promotions
- Customer service
- Payment process
- Checkout process
- Competence and closing orientation
- Overall impression
Why Use DataMyte Digital Clipboard?
If you’re looking to conduct mystery shopping for your respective business, you’ll need a reliable and user-friendly mystery shopping checklist. DataMyte Digital Clipboard is the perfect tool for the job, as it offers a variety of features that will streamline the mystery shopping process.
With DataMyte Digital Clipboard, you can:
- Create and customize mystery shopping checklists that mystery shoppers can use to make the most of their job.
- Assign mystery shoppers and track their progress in real-time.
- Generate reports with mystery shopping data to improve employee performance
- View mystery shopping analytics to gain valuable insight into your business
- Share mystery shopping results with stakeholders to get multiple feedback from relevant people.
- Create a workflow that will help improve business operations in line with improving the flaws found.
With DATAMYTE, mystery shopping has never been easier. So what are you waiting for? Start using DataMyte Digital Clipboard today and see the difference it can make for your business.
Conclusion
If you’re thinking of mystery shopping for your business or already using mystery shoppers, you’ll need a mystery shopper checklist. This checklist will help you identify what you should look for when mystery shopping, and it will also help you keep track of your findings. Use tools such as DataMyte’s Digital Clipboard to help you streamline the mystery shopping process.
