Mystery Shopping: MKOR's Tool for Measuring Brand Promises

Mystery Shopping is a market research tool that helps you understand the real-world use and experience of products and services offered by your company. If you’re looking to boost sales, develop new products, increase market share, or maintain leadership in your industry, you need Mystery Shopping services. After all, how can you improve something that isn’t measured?

Mystery Shopping research began around 1940 when a private investigator firm, WilMark in the USA, started employing undercover agents to evaluate the honesty of employees.

Since then, this market research method has evolved to focus more on collecting data about consumer experiences with products and services provided by companies globally.

This type of market study is highly suitable for sectors such as:

• FMCG
• Banking and financial services
• Auto industry
• Healthcare
• Financial Services
• Technology
• Manufacturing
• Customer service

Mystery Shopping tackles essential issues for any business, starting with identifying discrepancies between the company-established standards and their practical application. This process unveils gaps in the consumer experience, providing a solid foundation for adjustments and enhancements.

Thus, the feedback obtained through Mystery Shopping is immensely valuable because it grants the company insightful data to enhance the quality of services and strengthen customer relationships.

Mystery Shopping research is a strategic tool for measuring customer satisfaction and identifying areas in need of improvement. This type of feedback allows the company to better understand consumer expectations and tailor services to meet these expectations.

Ultimately, Mystery Shopping provides you with essential insights into the purchase experience and consumer behavior, key to any marketing strategy and product development. This information aids in optimizing the customer journey and creating memorable experiences.

To ensure an efficient Mystery Shopping service, MKOR works closely with your company to define the specific objectives of the research project. MKOR then develops a personalized plan aligned with your company’s needs. The effective implementation of Mystery Shopping visits is marked by a thorough analysis of the collected data, which is used to compile a detailed report with observations and customized recommendations.

How does Mystery Shopping Research Help Your Company?

Are you delivering on the promises made to your clients?

The answer to this question depends on many variables: sales growth, how well your brand is perceived, how readily consumers accept modifications to products and services, how swiftly new products and services are embraced, and the general perception of your brand’s trustworthiness. Unfortunately, these are not reflected in profit and loss statements or the balance sheet.

This qualitative market research helps measure a set of relevant indicators to identify the concrete experiences of clients in every interaction with your company’s employees, products, and services, including the general presentation of each store/unit of the company network.

If you’re keen to uncover:

• How your sales staff performs against the brand standards and if they adhere to all operational procedures;
• Ways to mitigate workplace risks and ensure the safety and legal compliance of your staff and clients;
• How promotional offers are communicated by your employees and the efficiency of launching new products;
• Information about your competitors: what practices you might learn from them;

then Mystery Shopping research is exactly what suits your company’s needs.

Traditional survey-based research can’t offer the detailed insights that Mystery Shopping provides by evaluating the actual customer experience in stores and the utility of your company’s offerings.

Overall, the use of Mystery Shopping services can help your company enhance the services and products offered, increase customer satisfaction, and maintain a competitive edge in the market.

This can only be achieved by assessing various quality indicators that we define together, based on your company’s goals. Only what is measured and evaluated can be developed and improved.

How Do You Measure If Your Brand’s Promises Are Fulfilled?

Mystery Shopping is an invaluable tool for verifying whether the promises of a brand are honored in reality. By assessing the customer experience in interactions with your services or products, with employees, the presentation of the location, and even the competition, Mystery Shopping measures the degree to which the real experience aligns with the standards and values promoted by your brand.

The Mystery Shopping Service helps you to:

✅ Understand Your Customers’ Perspective

Mystery shoppers are real customers who can provide genuine insights into how your business operations are perceived and if they’re aligning with the customers’ expectations. They experience interactions with employees firsthand, providing authentic feedback on client engagement and the overall utilization experience of your products or services, including quality, functionality, and accessibility.

✅ Evaluate Employee Work Practices

This technique enables you to ensure employees are performing their duties correctly and upholding company standards and values. Observing employee behavior and the discrepancies needing improvement helps maintain and enhance your brand’s image. Feedback from research reports can pinpoint operational weak spots for refinement and service enhancement.

✅ Discover Compliance with Your Brand Standards Across Different Locations

Mystery Shopping assesses if your brand values are consistently upheld in different locations. This can reveal which aspects need attention and if the training provided to staff aligns with the desired brand portrayal.

✅ Evaluate Protocols and Programs

Mystery shoppers offer detailed insights on how your customer service protocols and programs are perceived by the clients, from unveiling new products to the timeliness of deliveries, product availability, store layout adherence, and emergency response procedures. This evaluation helps identify potential problems before they escalate, ensuring that activities comply with company standards.

✅ Monitor Customer Satisfaction

The service identifies the factors leading to customer dissatisfaction, from store conditions to staff interactions, and all other aspects that can impact the client’s experience, enabling you to make necessary improvements.

✅ Evaluate Competitive Practices

Mystery Shopping can also be used to analyze competitors, providing insights into how they deliver service, and customer experiences in their own environments. This benchmarking is essential for understanding how your business measures up against competitors and what strategies might be adopted for improvement.

Each aspect of this external market research is a tool for preemptive action, offering a snapshot of direct customer experience before it potentially impacts your business reputation or customer satisfaction.

MKOR’s Operational Model

Knowing how your clients purchase and utilize your services and products is crucial. MKOR’s comprehensive approach to Mystery Shopping is meticulously organized to answer this complex question.

MKOR employs highly trained professional shoppers to measure how well your brand promises are being delivered to your clients and their experience with your services. They evaluate your company’s physical locations in a systematic way, following a rigorous set of indicators that need to be tracked and monitored. Mystery Shopping thus provides targeted, qualitative research that yields specific insights into the actual experiences of your company’s clients.

If you choose to work with us, the initial step is to identify your company’s objectives and the metrics for success. We start structuring the Mystery Shopping program by profiling customer targets, utilizing the full range of available data. Market segmentation is crucial here, considering both demographic and psychographic characteristics to pinpoint relevant customer segments.

Depending on specific needs, we decide whether to focus on a nationally representative sample or a particular market segment. From this analysis, we define the scenarios and scripts for the mystery visits, including logistical details, and craft a precise questionnaire for the essential data collection. This ensures that any category of person can be a mystery shopper for your company.

The next step is to transform these objectives and success metrics into a rigorous methodology that’s easy to follow and understand for our mystery shoppers.

Our methodology is crafted to measure, as specifically as possible, the actual experience in each store or unit, interactions with employees, as well as product and service presentation, providing relevant and valid data from the customer’s perspective.

Attention to detail is one of our strong suits at MKOR. The way we craft questions is a prime example. Asking “Was the staff friendly?” might not yield relevant insights. A better set of questions could be:

• Did the staff smile?
• Were you asked how your day was?
• Did you enjoy your meal/service?
• Did the staff pay attention throughout your interaction?

Our question formulation ensures a very clear briefing so that mystery shoppers can provide objective responses concerning the monitored indicators.

Mystery shoppers visit your company’s physical locations such as stores, clinics, banks, or service centers. The evaluation is specialized, meticulous, and relevant to the specifics of your business.

The MKOR team collects data from mystery shoppers and transforms them into highly detailed, documented reports. These reports contain organized information that helps you understand what corrective actions are needed, and what aspects your company excels at in relation to its own customers.

We utilize modern technology for the collection and provision of data in real-time. Moreover, we employ artificial intelligence to analyze the advantages of the obtained data, but we’re talking about qualitative data, where human interpretation and subjectivism matter. The drafting and presentation of the reports represent the final product that you receive from us.

With already 11 years of experience in the Romanian market and having worked on over 250 projects with more than 150 clients, we also provide consulting to identify how you can gather other relevant market data for your business.