Mystery Shopping

Are your valuable customers being turned away by errant employees or insensitive managers? Is your equipment not measuring up to the expectations of your customers? Your business needs mystery shoppers to help you know the true status of your business.

In mystery shopping, trained shoppers are sent disguised as real shoppers to go and interact with business establishments on the high street such as banks, retail stores, restaurants, saloons and  flower shops. Other popular mystery shopping categories are hotel mystery shopping, gas station mystery shopping, spa mystery shopping and hospital mystery shopping.

Trained professionals are sent as a field team with well-defined guidelines and according to these guidelines they interact with your employees and use the services using a predefined format. In fact, your entire mystery shopping programme pretty much depends on how the researchers derive insights out of customer experience.

For the health of your business it is essential that your customers feel happy visiting your place. How do they really feel? You can either ask them or just assume that since you are providing a good service according to your own evaluation or according to the feedback of your employees, your customers must be happy. Although asking them frequently does help, due to various reasons many customers don’t provide you a qualified response that you can actually use to improve the way your customers are served.

Unless your business establishment is completely operated by machines, you have employees. How do these employees interact with your customers? Are they polite? Do they give the right information? Do your customers get the top-notch service they deserve when they visit your business place? Are their problems solved when they contact your help desk?

Can you do shopping at your own establishment disguised as a mystery shopper? Sure, you can do that, but how many times can you do that and is it even feasible?

One of the best ways of finding out how your business is serving is using a mystery shopping service.

Mystery shopping services by FG Connect

With our mystery shopping services we can provide you unparalleled customer insights and authentic evaluation and analysis of your business establishment. We are easily among the best mystery shopping companies in the UK. Whether you want researchers and respondents to mystery shop in the UK, USA, the UAE and beyond, we have a strong team of trained mystery shoppers who can physically visit your business location and directly interact with your employees and services. They can also interact with your employees through your call centre facilities and chat bot interface to augment their mystery shopping experience. In fact, whatever means of communication is used to serve your customers and provide them support, our mystery shopping service professionals can use it to gather real-time data and feedback for you. From hotel mystery shopping to visiting gas station mystery shops to solving flower shop mysteries, to retail mystery shopping, our researchers can help you in multiple arenas.

We provide our services both in the UK and UAE. We have the needed infrastructure and expertise across the spectrum to provide you world class mystery shopping services. After every mystery shopping expedition, we will provide you detailed reports based on predetermined metrics.

During mystery shopping expeditions, our employees and recruits will visit your business establishment and interact with it like an actual customer. They will buy products and services. They will walk around among the aisles just like regular customers. They will avail facilities and use all mechanisms installed at your business establishment to help your customers buy more. If required, they will spend time at your business establishment (for example a health retreat, a hospital or a hotel) and using a predetermined set of observational rules, they will note down every aspect of doing business with you including employee behaviour and the condition of the infrastructure. For example, if you run a health centre one of our researchers can visit your place as a patient and interact with the help desk and even with some physicians. One of our mystery shoppers can call your telephone service and find out how your support staff interacts with an average caller. A researcher can use your chat bot to find out if he or she gets the right answer for his or her queries.

Such interface testing is impossible if it is carried out by one of your employees or even by yourself because from within the organisation, you can never even imagine with what sort of queries and questions your customers and clients may come up. The best way to know how your customer service works, is to employ a research agency like ours and use our mystery shopping services.

We can assemble a team of mystery shoppers as per your guidelines based on ethnography, gender, income groups, age groups, linguistics, designations, educational qualifications and professions. We can go as vertical as your business need.

Advantages of using a mystery shopping service

Listed below are some advantages of using professional mystery shopping services:

• You get first-hand experience of how your customers feel when they visit your business establishment.
• You get live feedback on your employees without your employees ever knowing that they are being assessed.
• You can decide observation metrics for mystery shoppers so that you get exactly the feedback you are looking for to be able to improve your customer service.
• You can decide whether the mystery shoppers must engage with your business remotely or by physically visiting your establishment.
• You can carry out ongoing assessment of your employees and infrastructure in terms of employee behaviour, etiquettes, and accessibility for persons with disabilities.
• You can get your website, support centre and chat facility analysed by trained mystery shoppers who will give you qualified feedback untarnished by any bias.
• You can find out if people abandon your shopping cart midway on your website due to various distractions and misplaced elements.
• You can fine tune your entire sales funnel by finding out through mystery shoppers why people leave your sales funnel and drop the idea of buying from you, or, which products influence the decision of the researcher in favour of or against other products.
• You can improve customer retention by finding out how you can make your customers happier.
• Your employees are always on guard and consequently, on their best behaviour because they never know who a mystery shopper is and who is a real customer.

Disadvantages of using a mystery shopping service for your business

Frankly, there aren’t many disadvantages of using mystery shopping for your business. Sometimes mystery shopping may upset your employees and staff because they may think that you mistrust them but, in that case, you need to educate them that it is simply a business process to maintain quality and nothing personal.

Mystery shopping is an ongoing process because you need to maintain the quality of your business as long as you are doing business. Some may think it as an extra cost but considering the benefit that you derive out of mystery shopping services, it is a small price to pay.