How can you use mystery shopping to analyze your competitors?

One of the best advantage of mystery shopping is that it allows you to assess your competitor's stores and experience their services out there in a real marketplace. It brings the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors that can be used to your advantage. Example: Mystery shopping can give insights about how more persuasive merchandizer from a competition converts prospects to sales effectively. It can also tell you that your major competitor is always short of a particular item that's in demand, you can put an extra stock of this in-demand item on shelf to convert customers to your brand. Last but not the least you can evaluate new products against competition more effectively than a any market research report!💡

Prestando consultoria a uma rede de restaurantes, apliquei a metodologia do cliente oculto e foi de grande valia. Os resultados nos ajudaram a traçar novos padrões de qualidade para o atendimento, bem como novas ideias e formas de oferta de produtos e serviços dos restaurantes. Foi uma experiência valiosa, que implicou em novas ações de marketing e essas nos trouxeram incremento de vendas e melhores depoimentos e avaliações nas redes sociais, incluindo o trip advisor.

Identify competitors, set objectives, create scenarios, recruit mystery shoppers, train them, conduct the shopping, collect data, analyse results, compare with your business, make changes, and repeat. It's a simple yet effective way to stay ahead in the game!

In general, Mystery shopping with competitors is aimed to gain valuable insights not easily quantified publicly and/or validate anecdotal feedback about competitors’ business. This exercise allows analysis of various qualitative and quantitative aspects, including point of sale activity, service/product quality, capacity/inventory assessment, customer journey mapping, complaint resolution efficiency, and adherence to service level agreements. By deploying mystery shoppers, businesses can uncover nuanced details about their competitors' operations, customer experience, and areas for improvement, providing insights for development of strategic responses to competitor activity.

Worth to mention, that classifying mystery shopping can be both under the umbrella of qualitative and quantitative research, as ultimately the shopper will fill in a questionnaire, however the shopper will answer some questions that are qualitative in its nature

Objective Customer Experience Insights: Mystery shoppers provide an unbiased view of the customer experience, offering insights that regular feedback mechanisms might not capture. They can assess various aspects like service quality, employee behavior, and store environment from a customer's perspective. Quality Control and Standards Compliance: Regular mystery shopping helps ensure that company standards are consistently met across all locations. It's an effective way to monitor and enforce compliance with operational procedures, service protocols, and company policies. Employee Performance Evaluation: It helps in evaluating staff performance in a real-world setting. This can be particularly useful for staff training and development.

I think Mystery Shopping is a very effective tool to understand how you fare. It helps benchmark better and throws great light onto the area of improvement. Many times it feels like you are preying competition info. I have a different view: look at it as an opportunity to improve your commitment and service to your consumers. It’s about benchmarking against the best to adopt practices that help you build a loyal base. So many times I tell my team to not just look at competition but also look at other industry leaders. You need to create value than just being a replicator or me 2.

Leverage mystery shopping for a strategic edge! Benchmark customer experience, pricing, and promotions at competitors. Evaluate staff knowledge and inventory presentation for differentiation. Assess service speed and feedback mechanisms. Strategically integrate mystery shopping for valuable insights, stay ahead of trends, and refine your strategies. Gain a competitive edge by decoding competitors' moves!

Mystery shopping can be a good way to "catch employees doing well." With well-trained mystery shoppers who fit your customer profile, you'll get a front-row view of your customer's experience and factors that can affect loyalty and buying behavior.

It is an important and current product to measure market behavior and detect new practices and innovations. A big secret to the success of a Mystery Shopper study is to use a good company in the field or have a highly trained and continuously monitored team for this type of information collection. I have experienced studies where the collection was not so well done (transposing what was seen and experienced into the questionnaire) and the analysis of the results proved to be inconsistent and not very actionable.

Define Objectives: Clearly outline what you want to evaluate (e.g., customer service, product quality, store layout). Choose Locations: Select which and how many locations to assess. Develop a Checklist: Create a detailed list of criteria and questions for shoppers to follow. Hire Mystery Shoppers: Choose individuals who match your typical customer profile. Provide Training: Ensure shoppers understand their tasks and reporting requirements. Conduct Visits: Schedule visits randomly to avoid predictability. Collect and Analyze Data: Gather reports, analyze data, and identify trends or issues. Implement Improvements: Use insights for training, policy updates, or other improvements.

Mystery shopping programs are diverse as it’s not only covering your competitors or potential players in the market, yet it is a powerful mechanism to measure your own services, products and all related aspects

Clearly defining the objectives is important. Are there specific aspects of the shopper experience you want to focus on? Do you want to see how employees handle particular types of customer interactions? Are mystery shopping results included in bonus program components? Plan your shop accordingly. Make the shop straightforward so that it is comfortable for a trained shopper to perform and undetectable to your employees.

- Choose very subjective people - Have them test each and every touchpoint there is - Choose 3-5 different people to conduct the exercise, preferably a bit different from each other to make sure you're grasping what the vast majority of customers you're likely to encounter think of your products/services. - Don't specify any conditions other than trying and testing every possibly measurable touch point!

Defining objective is the most important part of this analysis. First of all, we need to prepare questions to gather valuable insights on their customer experience, pricing, overall operations, etc. (depending on what sort of insights we want). Then, use the collected data to identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement in comparison to our own business.

Brands often do this to their competitors with a long list of items to test and find out. However, this often give it away as your competitors will start to suspect as normal customers don't behave this way. So, spilt the list to 2 shorter ones and give to two different teams to execute.

One thing I've found critical in Mystery Shopping studies is the need to find good agencies who can execute these studies well. High quality recruitment and training of the shoppers is critical to collecting data that is reliable, as the data is directly read from the Mystery Shoppers' experience; these data do not go through a layer of interpretation by researchers.

I think that executing a mystery shopping project effectively demands meticulous planning and a commitment to action based on the gathered insights: 1. Define Objectives. 2. Create Detailed Guidelines 3. Recruit Reliable Shoppers (Select discreet, observant mystery shoppers aligned with your target customer profile). 4. Develop Scenarios. 5. Provide Training. 6. Deploy Strategically. 7. Collect Data Consistently. 8. Analyze Results. 9. Implement Changes. 10. Maintain Confidentiality. From defining objectives to maintaining confidentiality, each step contributes to a strategic and actionable approach for enhancing operations based on the gathered data.

Choose people who're very keen on being true to the job, no hard feelings, no personal opinions, just being as frank and subjective as possible. This way, you make sure that what you're building your next moves on is solid and would definitely yield results!

In all my Malls, I have used as many Mystery Shoppers as I can afford, for their independent thinking and 'their own' way of evaluating specific elements of the mall that I need looked at . . - know what YOU want out of the Mystery Shopper program - let the THEM do their work - meet and interrogate their findings afterwards - SHARE the key outcomes with the affected retailer so that they can learn and uplift their service standards

Mystery shopping can be a real good insight into your competitors & how they operate. One area it could give insights is how they train their store teams on the selling process. Same for customer service (so do include a follow up call / response to check how they respond & handle customer complaints or queries) It’s also important to get notes on their display of merchandise - mystery shoppers can tell you what your competitor or you are better at & that could give you actionable tasks or see how better to exploit your strength

Mystery shopping is an effective tool to gauge the performance of certain elements among competitors . Brands should look at the results and analyse what could be adapted and what need not,because it will not add value if the processes are copied identically. The Pros & Cons need to be evaluated and make sure the learnings are adapted according to the DNA of the brand so that there is a right fitment.

Uma vez identificados os gargalos da operação, é preciso organizar todas as informações e dados relevantes para treinar pessoas-chave para eliminar ou minimizar tais gargalos. O papel do cliente oculto não é (e não deve ser) apenas apontar falhas. Identifique também o que é positivo e reforce isso em sua operação para aumentar as chances de sucesso do seu negócio.

Mystery Shopping should be used as a methodology only when the business needs real-time/on-site feedback about customer experience on a touchpoint; that cannot be collected by other methodologies.

Don't just use mystery shopping as a way to study your competitors. Also use it to measure and evaluate your own strategy, staff, execution, etc

Acredito que uma das várias estratégias que podem ser utilizadas com comprador secreto é a identificação da forma pela qual o concorrente lida com objeções à marca dele bem como comparações com a sua marca. Ou seja, como argumenta quando alguém diz algo negativo sobre a marca concorrente ou até mesmo quando esse cliente fala bem da marca concorrente dele: como ele se defende, quais racionais usa, se é ético ou não, se fala a verdade, se se conhece, se conhece a sua marca concorrente, etc.

Mystery Shopping studies can be expensive because of the need to recruit, train and place Shoppers in the scenarios to collect data. As this is still a very human process, make sure there is a good system/guidelines for Shoppers, so that data collected back is not too overwhelming and can be easily presented and actioned upon

A really good mystery shopping agency can be an important partner. In addition to providing shopper reports, they should be able to set up dashboards for your shops, control access to results reports, and give you to have different ways to analyze the data -- all of which save you time. They recruit and train staff to understand how to properly conduct mystery shops. They manage shopper scheduling and payments. They make it easier to find suitable shoppers for out-of-the ordinary settings.

Use mystery shopping at the B2B level to study yourselves, and measure your sales teams against the data you hold on your competitors. Test your sales teams - Initial response Follow-up after initial contact Length of time to respond, method of response Number of people passed to/through Sales professionalism Sales knowledge Clarity of sales messages, ability to answer questions Which competitive comparison points addressed Proposal Aggressiveness of sale Company differentiators highlighted in discussions Follow-up, consistency and method. etc, etc.