How Do Small Businesses Use Mystery Shopping?

Most small business owners are familiar with mystery shopping, but not all may know the many purposes it can serve. Here's a quick outline of how mystery shopping can help your business.

• Higher than normal customer complaints - When your customer complaints spike, you can use mystery shopping to help pinpoint the root cause of what caused them. You can then use the detailed insights received from the mystery shop evaluation to help get your associates and business back on track.

• Assure your brand promise is met - Your customers have expectations of your business, lots of them. Plus, you've worked hard to design a service and sales experience to meet or exceed those expectations. Using mystery shopping to call, click or visit your business posing as your typical customers will help you understand if you are, and bring attention to new opportunities to help improve.

• You suspect or wish to disprove an issue - Do you suspect you have an issue or wish to disprove an issue at your business? With mystery shopping you can create a scenario around the suspected issue and have a mystery shopper visit, posing as a typical customer, to verify whether it's really happening or not.

• Reward your team - Mystery shoppers love catching associates doing things right. Mystery shopping can bring you very specific, detailed information that you can turn into a reward/incentive program for your team. This can help build your company culture and take better care of your customers for the long-term.

• Identify best practices - Once identified, these best practices become the basis for training programs across all associates or locations, for sustained improved performance.

• The owner's eyes and ears -A small business owner can't be everywhere at once, leading them to wonder if things are the same when they're not around. Typically a small business owners' biggest fear is not being able to see what's happening at every location of their business. To help solve this "visibility" issue, mystery shopping can be your eyes and ears to help you know that your customers are being taken care of when you're not there.

• Verify processes - It's important that associates and managers follow established processes to deliver consistently great customer experiences. Mystery shopping can verify, with great detail, whether your processes are being followed by all.

• Check on training effectiveness - Small businesses only have so much time and budget for training and you need to make sure it "sticks". The highly detailed, story-like reports you will receive from a mystery shopping report can tell you, quickly, if your training is effective.

• Loss prevention - Mystery shoppers can also be used to help spot both employee and customer theft or suspected theft.

• Competitor intel - Want to know what your competitors are up to? A well-designed mystery shopping program can send evaluators into their business and pose as their customers. It's perfectly legal, brings great insight, and can even help you recruit better associates and managers, if need be.

Get started with a mystery shopping program

CustomerOptix offers affordable, customizable mystery shopping programs for small businesses. With our self-service program, small business owners can get a program up and running in as little as 10 minutes, with no minimums, no contracts and no long-term commitments required. Gain real-time feedback on what your customers experience and think about your business to help you improve your customer experience.

Contact us and get started with a small business solution today.