You’ll be amazed at just how many secrets you can uncover with mystery shopping. This proven market research strategy can help you learn a whole lot about your business, and it isn’t just those compliments you’ll love to hear.

Mystery shopping helps you uncover and establish the difference between your actual business and your aspirations without sugarcoating anything. When managed properly, here are three invaluable business secrets you can uncover with mystery shopping.

This is perhaps the biggest benefit of this market research method. Mystery shopping offers high-quality insights you can rely on when you need data on your level of customer service. Regardless of your level of conviction on the quality of service your staff offers, you can only understand what real customers make of your service by commissioning mystery shoppers to gain real insights.

For businesses that require interactions between customers and salespeople, this market research strategy can help you experience service from the perspective of your customers so you can understand how employees’ attitudes and behaviors impact your customers. The value of this data can prove very critical in making the necessary improvements to improve the service experience for the average customer.

Inventory management issues can pose a tough challenge for many businesses.

While proper availability can impact business profitability, the reverse is the case when customers are unable to find what they need to purchase. Along with assessing customer services, mystery shopping services can also help address product availability, inventory levels, and product placement, among others.

Are customers often having to deal with empty shelves and low inventories? Do customers find commonly purchased products easily accessible within your stores? These and other key issues that could impact the customer’s shopping experience can also be revealed with carefully designed mystery shopping services.

Some time ago, we published a piece on how to navigate mystery shopping in a post-pandemic world. This has become necessary as businesses the world over adjusts to the reality of the coronavirus pandemic. More than ever, cleanliness and hygiene need attention taking both employees’ and customers’ health into consideration.

Customers not only want your business premises to look neat and tidy. They also want to be sure it is hygienic and meets today’s standards for cleanliness. This is most important if your business deals in food items. Products on the shelf gathering dust after been unsold after a while is a common example. While these might matter little to you or your employees, mystery shopping can help beam the light on this and a variety of other issues that can make or break the business.

Businesses often have to make a decision between assembling an in-house team for market research or commissioning a market leader like DSG Associates for their mystery shopping and other market research service needs. Either way, this strategy is quite powerful and boasts great value for anyone looking to run a customer-focused business.

Mystery shopping can help you uncover valuable insights to help you take your business to the next level. If you’re interested in exploring this (and you should!) the experts at DSG Associates will be more than happy to help you get started.