Over 8 million mystery shops are being conducted each year.

Granted that there are insane benefits of this market survey strategy which can be a great way to measure customer experience during the pandemic, you need more than just a hurriedly put-together plan for tangible results.

In today’s blog, we discuss five (5) actionable tips for designing smart and strategic mystery shopping programs to guarantee excellent returns on your investment with measurable and insightful results. Leggo!

There are three key aspects of mystery shopping.

First, the shoppers visit the service points.

Then, they pretend like regular customers to make purchases and study different aspects of the business’s service delivery.

And thirdly, they record a detailed report of their observation and experience, following a questionnaire.

But there’s more to this than just getting anonymous shoppers to visit your store.

You need to adopt a market research mentality because that’s actually what it is. You need to be strategic with the entire plan from data collection methods to time and resources allocation. Everything needs to be right from the onset to ensure results that are accurate representations of the current level of service.

Talking of accurately representing the quality of service, your plans for schedule and frequency matter a lot. Mystery shopping represents a tiny fraction of the entire sales being handled; so, there’s a great need to be strategic with your time and the frequency of the visits. This particular strategy will help ensure a proper correlation between the mystery shopping experience and the overall customer experience and sales performance. And to achieve this, a reasonable volume of data should be collected across different times, shifts and days of the week, among others, so you don’t end up with results that are outliers or worthless.

You can either assemble your own mystery shopping team or partner with any of the hundreds of agencies in this billion-dollar industry. Our post on choosing managed or DIY market research gives insight into what to expect in either case. Regardless, it’s very important to work with a proven template to guarantee the best results.

Here at DSG Associates, for example, we’ve perfected our questionnaire templates over the past four decades we’ve been in business. You can trust that this template will always be tailored for your industry and business. Aside from speeding up the set up time, this gives more room for success whether you’re benchmarking your results against your industry’s or focusing on differentiating your business from competitors.

Mystery shoppers are the powerhouse of mystery shopping. So, it’s important to ensure they are well-compensated to keep them highly motivated. Because of this, DSG Associates made our per-shop pricing as transparent as possible. And along with reimbursements for their shopping expenses, we often tack on additional compensation for the time and resources invested in completing a shop.

Over the years, we’ve found out that providing significant compensation for our mystery shoppers helps keep them highly motivated which in turn helps improve the quality of the entire process and the results.

There are many companies operating in our industry for businesses that recognize the value of mystery shopping in measuring employee service delivery quality and behavior. However, the company you contract to handle this can make or break the entire process. You want a mystery shopping agency with the right capabilities and a robust experience to match. At DSG Associates, we don’t just sign you up to leave you in the dark. We’ll keep you in the loop during the entire process. And our years of experience, results, and reputation means you can always trust an agency of our caliber to deliver, regardless of your industry or your unique needs.

All of these tips will go a long way to ensure success with mystery shopping. While these might not be all, they’re a great starting point if you’re serious about leveraging mystery shopping for real measurable results. contact us today at DSG Associates and we can help you get insights into potential areas that need improvement through our other top-of-the-range market survey and research services.