Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Understanding the Mystery Shopper Program

By Ethan Hunter


Mystery shopping programs have been available and in use since the 1940's, yet most consumers are unaware of their existence or their purpose. Most companies can benefit from the type of service offered by a mystery shopper program as the results provided can be invaluable to the organization as a whole.

While each mystery shopper program is slightly different, they all operate on the same concept, which includes sending in an anonymous person to take inventory of various aspects of the business. With this information being reported back to the business using the mystery shopper program, customer perception of services and/or products sold can be analyzed, allowing corrections to be made.

You could be the owner of a store that has started to see a drop in sales. There may be a reason for this but you have absolutely no idea what that reason is. By using a mystery shopper program you can see exactly what the problem is and therefore you can work out a solution to gain more business.

The main advantage to using a mystery shopper program is that you get unbiased results. You also get to choose which areas of your business you want evaluating. By taking a look at the results, analyzing them and seeing where the problems lie, often business owners can help to get their business back to full working order and they soon start to see the profits rolling in again.

The number one reason businesses fail is not having real information on overall performance and customer satisfaction. The goal when choosing any mystery shopper program is having a means of understanding the customer's needs. The more you can learn about what your customers do and do not like, the better chance of you have of being successful.

The information that you will be provided in the report will be valuable to your business; it will give you insight into your customer's experiences, something that you would not be able to obtain in another fashion. This information is worth every penny of the investment required to launch a mystery shopper program.

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