Use Mystery Shopping To Explore The Customer Experience

By Author: Belinda Darling
Total Articles: 152
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Do you own or manage a medium- to large-size business? If so, you already know how important the customer experience is to your bottom line. A positive experience will lead to increased sales, while negative impressions tend to reduce sales. With social networking being so popular these days, negative impressions can also cost a company its reputation if enough people post negative feedback and comments.

What Do Your Customers Think of You?

Understanding that customer experience is important is one thing, but how does a company get honest, reliable customer feedback? Without this information, business owners can only guess at what their customers may or may not be thinking. There is a better way to get customer insights.

Mystery Shopping Is the Answer

It does not matter if your business is online, brick-and-mortar, or a combination of both, knowing what your visitors think of your business is vital to ensuring you deliver what they want. By that same token, knowing the problems customers experience is the first step in correcting those problems. Mystery shopping allows business owners ...
... to get all of this information, quickly and efficiently.

An effective mystery shopping campaign involves a trained and knowledgeable individual visiting your business as a customer and moving through the process just as any other customer might do. As this individual moves through the process, he or she takes note of the positive aspects as well as the negative aspects they encounter. Using a customer satisfaction survey, as well as other reporting tools, the information they gather is presented to the business owner. With this information, business owners can make adjustments and correct any problem areas that have been identified.

The overall goal of these campaigns is not to point fingers or affix blame but rather to give business owners the tools they need to enhance the customer experience. When businesses address the issues their customers may have, and resolve those problems in a timely manner, increased sales and positive customer feedback are more likely to follow. Mystery shopping campaigns can provide the tools needed to make all of that happen.

The Power of a Customer Satisfaction Survey

Customers are people, and as such each will have his or her own expectations when it comes to buying products or services. One reliable way to know if your business is meeting those expectations is ask. A well-formatted customer satisfaction survey is a great way to gather that information.

A well-prepared survey can reveal what customers truly think about your company and the buying experience. It can provide insights into what the customer wants and what the customer does not want. A good survey can reveal the problem areas that might be causing your customers to walk away or to not make the purchase. In other words - lost sales equals lost revenues.

As mentioned above, when you know the negative aspects that customers encounter, you can begin correcting those issues. Customer satisfaction will begin to increase as the customer experience begins to improve. All of this can, and does, lead to better sales, positive feedback, and more repeat business. For these reasons, mystery shopping services are worth looking into.

The Realise Group is one of Australia’s top mystery shopping companies, offering services and advice on all aspects of customer satisfaction, service and ensuring the best customer satisfaction results in your stores.