Moving Beyond Mystery Shopping and Evaluating Customers' True Experiences

Satisfying customers and increasing sales go hand-in-hand for retailers. That's one reason why so many employ mystery shopping programs to gauge their customers’ satisfaction. And while mystery shopping has been a retailer mainstay for decades, technology and resource innovations make it easier for today’s retailers to get deeper and broader feedback from the people who know it best — actual customers.

Web-based enterprise feedback management (EFM) solutions go straight to the source and well beyond the point-in-time, observation-based evaluations mystery shopping programs produce. Sure, there's still room for mystery shopping to get outside-in perspectives or test specific employee protocols, but a direct customer feedback channel is the best way to obtain the critical customer intelligence needed to make strategic decisions.

Measuring the 'True' Experience
There's a gold mine of useful insights buried in customers’ experiences. How do they shop? Which brands are they interested in? Are they concerned with service or speed? Do they notice when the store isn’t clean? Mystery shoppers cannot answer these questions because they cannot be measured strictly by observation.

A mystery shopping report might note that a checkout area was cluttered, for example, but it can't measure whether customers would (a) notice this and (b) how much impact it had on their likelihood to return to that store. Retailers can't perfect every aspect of their stores; they must prioritize time and resources. With an EFM approach, retailers can gain insights into what truly matters to customers, exploring every dimension of the shopping experience, and address the issues that, ultimately, are most important to customers.

It's All About the Data
Mystery shopping is inherently time- and resource-intensive. The result of that is budgets only allow for a few data points to be collected for a given store each month, which leads to data validity issues. With a comprehensive EFM customer experience initiative, retailers can evaluate larger volumes of data that yield higher reliability and provide issues analysis at a granular level. For example, retailers can drill down to individual stores or departments and be confident that the feedback they're receiving is representative of the larger sample set.

Keeping Costs in Check
As mentioned above, on a cost-per-data-point basis, mystery shopping is expensive — and there's typically little incremental savings for increasing data points. With today's current economic pressures, retailers are being forced to make hard decisions and cut costs. Many are solving this issue by limiting the number or frequency of mystery shopping campaigns.

However, this undermines their whole effort as sample sizes become too small or trend data is spread too far apart. EFM solutions don’t have the same fixed and variable cost structures. Scaling from 100 responses to 100,000 responses comes with very little incremental cost.

Ultimately, retailers and consumers both benefit from the use of a comprehensive customer feedback program. Collecting customer insights directly is a robust, yet cost-effective way for retailers to evaluate and make meaningful changes that customers recognize and value.

Take a look at your evaluation efforts — whether it's a mystery shopping program or something else — to make sure you're not missing critical direct feedback and opportunities to create better customer experiences.

Vinay Singh is director of business development at PeriscopeIQ, an enterprise feedback management provider. Reach Vinay at vsingh@periscopeiq.com.