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What is Mystery Shopping?

Mystery shopping involves anonymous individuals, known as mystery shoppers, who assess various aspects of your business by acting as regular customers.

This includes testing points of sales, verifying employee performance against training standards, ensuring staff display in-house marketing materials, collecting competitor data, and evaluating phone calls and website systems. Over time, mystery shopping provides businesses with raw data about their overall health, pinpointing where revenue or opportunities for revenue may be lost.

What’s the Difference Between Mystery Shopping and a Customer Experience Survey?

A customer experience survey captures customers’ opinions about their experiences. For example, a customer may have had a positive experience because an employee was friendly and warm. However, did the employee offer another glass of wine or an appetizer before the entrée? Was the waiter prompt in clearing plates within three minutes of the guests finishing their meal, and did they provide personal touches like mentioning a favorite dessert? How quickly was water refilled, and why was a free drink given to the table in the corner? Additionally, photos revealed that three out of four toilets in the bathroom were out of toilet paper, and tissues were scattered on the floor.

Data doesn’t lie. With mystery shopping, you receive concrete information about your business’s performance. It measures where employees are adhering to training protocols and where they may be falling short. This allows you to address issues before they impact your revenue. Discover the truth about your business today—schedule a free consultation call.

Why can’t I just look at my social media reviews to see how my business is doing?

Social media reviews give us customers’ opinions, and a customer’s opinion is different than measuring: “Is my employee doing what I’ve trained them to do?” or better yet, “Is my employee maximizing all opportunities to sell and up-sell my service/product to my customers?” Mystery shopping is more than a customer review. It is a data collecting system that allows you to pin-point the exact areas of your business that need to be fixed, changed, or improved to save you money and increase overall profits.

Mystery shops have the capability of being incredibly specific and detailed. At Evalyn, we customize your mystery shops to exactly what you’d like to measure. We can also incorporate video and audio recording for a more comprehensive picture. If you’re ready to get to the real reasons why your company is losing profits or not growing as quickly as you anticipated, schedule a free consultation and we’d be happy to chat with you.

What kinds of things can you measure with mystery shopping?

At Evalyn, we focus on meeting your unique needs. As a boutique mystery shopping company, we specialize in highly customized mystery shops tailored to evaluate specific aspects of your business. Here are a few examples of what we can measure through our mystery shopping services:

Integrity
  • Cash going straight into the tip container
  • Overpouring alcohol (filling the jigger and then trailing to 1000+)
  • Liquor License compliance
  • Failing to immediately issue receipts
Product/Display Checks
  • Ensuring staff correctly display in-house marketing materials for promotions and programs
  • Testing employee delivery of promotional products
  • Monitoring compliance with key brand and company procedures/offerings
  • Ensuring important aspects of the product/service are adhered to
Competitor Checks
  • Collecting data on competitor promotions and programs
  • Comparing how your company’s service compares to competitors
  • Evaluating what competitors are doing that your business is not
  • Evaluating competitors’ quality of customer service
Sales
  • Improving check/sales averages
  • Monitoring all transaction points to identify missed sales triggers and exploit best practices
  • Enhancing the performance of underperforming stores
  • Boosting sales through training and suggestive selling techniques
Growth Management
  • Supporting new store expansions and programs
  • Surveying prospective acquisitions to assess operational performance
  • Ramping up new stores to profitability
  • Shorten new stores time to profitability /improve the success ratio
Customer Service
  • Assess customer service impressions to determine satisfaction
  • Focus in on likelihood of retention, and potential for return, (targeting the “loyal” customer)
  • Measuring timeliness of customer service
  • Minimizing complaints by catching issues early
Employee Training/Retention
  • Identifying problem managers/employees
  • Using survey data to fuel employee recognition and reward programs
  • Creating healthy competition among districts and locations
  • Gaining feedback from employees and managers on procedural effectiveness and areas for improvement

What types of mystery shopping features do you offer?