Mystery Shopping Investigations

Mystery shopping is a method used by marketing research companies and organizations that wish to measure quality of sales and service, job performance, regulatory compliance, or to gather specific information about a market or competitors, including products and services. Mystery Shopping is a fascinating method of gauging customer experience .

A mystery shopper is hired to investigate customer service and employee honesty at a business. Also known as a secret shopper, this investigator poses as a customer or client and tries to find out whether employees at a specific business are honest and helpful.

Why do you need to hire a private investigator?

There are plenty of reasons why you can’t afford not to try mystery shopping:

• One dissatisfied customer is likely to cost you a lot of business–most studies have found that customers not happy with their experience at a business usually will not complain to management. In most cases they will simply not do business with that retailer again and will encourage others not to do business with that retailer as well.
• Customer surveys and incentive programs have been proven to be less effective. Many customers are simply unwilling to share negative feedback with management or with others. Customers also tend to be biased, whereas professionals involved in mystery shopping exist solely to provide impartial information.
• Mystery shopping is conducted by marketing agencies, advertising agencies, mystery shopping service providers, private investigators etc.
• Mystery and secret shoppers can be planted at bars, restaurants, retail shops, and other businesses to make sure that your staff is behaving according to company policy and procedure. you are suspicious that your employees are cutting corners or neglecting to follow the procedure and policies of your organization, you may want to have an undercover investigation of your staff.

Mystery shopping can help to get feedback from customers on their experience, customer satisfaction, their brand perception. It helps to improve the quality of the customer service arena. Mystery audits can help you  make your services more progressive.  Mystery shopping can provide solutions to facility management like store cleanliness, whether the display is right and as per specifications, is the store layout as per the instructions from the top, is the comfortable sitting arrangement for customers, proper lighting and temperature, etc. It helps in proper functionality overall. Mystery shopping helps to detect illegal activities of employees at work. It also helps to check that rules are being adhered to and guidelines are being followed properly.