Mystery Shopping and Customer Satisfaction Surveys. In which my organization should invest?

In a search to expand a loyal customer base, the big classic question is what which techniques should an organization implement to appraise customer service as a whole?

With so much advancement in Technology, it is now much easy to inquire genuine customers about their experience for particular product or place. Customers surveys entails that shoppers are generally inclined to give their spare time to let us know what they envision about a particular service or product, in just few tabs of finger tips. Is this consequently, no longer needs of Mystery Shopping?

The simple answer is “No”. Both the terms have their own individuality, yet they can be correlated to get the final conclusion. The mystery shopping program would provide well-defined regionalized results so that the organization could check compliance and go directly to the concerned authorities where lacks were identified, while Customer Satisfaction Survey will offer a complete complete-subjective experience of an actual customer.

These two techniques work Hand in hand, Each of them has its own individual benefits where the assessment of one cannot be used by another. You should refrain yourself for asking mystery shopper for personal opinions, interpretations, points of view, emotions and judgments. The sample size is too modest and in addition the mystery shopper is being paid to do the job for which his subjective verdict is not legitimately pertinent. On the contrary, your real customers are not mystery shoppers. They didn't come at the store thinking about what they require to evaluate and if you enquire too much, they'll abort the survey or jump through the answers without a thought simply to reach the end.

By carefully correlating the results of these two techniques, you can attract more customers which is an ultimate goal of all these exercises. When studying mystery shopping vs. customer satisfaction surveys, it’s crucial to interpret how each one can contribute to achieve your goals and helps to rectify your practices.

Mystery Shopping – An Overview

Mystery shopping is a tool used by market research organizations to appraise quality of service, mainly involving compliance, or to collect particular data about products and services. The evaluations are assessed objectively through a clear discipline completely without personal opinion and bias. Mystery shopper’s task include particular observation, and in some case to enquiring product information and end up with a purchase. In many cases, specific scenario like generating a small complaint could be done. When employed efficaciously, a mystery shopping program can depict the level of consistency of your workers across all locations, boost conversion and UPT, as well as it confirms behaviors or perceptions portrayed through customer satisfaction surveys.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys – An Overview

Every organization would like to evaluate customer satisfaction. It is the essence of any modern business strategy. Experts reckon that virtually all North American organizations spend about 4% of revenues on buyer satisfaction measurement. Understanding customer demographics, anticipations, needs, and hopes produces an opportunity to assist customers better than your competitors do. Catering customers better creates gratified customers, establishes repeat business, and thrusts profitability.

These surveys can be exercised online or over the phone, yet the most significant step is fetching the data and turning it into actionable outcomes. Getting customer feedback and implementing it to your brand objectives will improve client experience and, ultimately, your company profitability.

Customer satisfaction surveys are excellent methods for disclosing how your buyers feel about your company as a whole, besides gauging their expiation in particular areas of their experience. Acquiring customer feedback through customer satisfaction surveys has numerous advantages, for instance, it offers customers a platform, where he feels his voice can be heard. In, addition, it also discovers new dimensions that driver customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction surveys give you an opportunity to analyze your weakness and improvements from the past.

What’s the Difference?

Generally, mystery shopping gives you an evaluation of your company's strengths and weaknesses, including overall public appeal. The purpose of implementing a mystery shopping program is to assess how well each store are following the company’s defined standards in all areas that are measurable. The evaluation, then would be generally about whether they DO or DON’T DO the oranization’s standard.

While customer satisfaction surveys identify the sources of both satisfaction and dissatisfaction, including the customer’s expectation VS their perception, whether they will recommend the shop to friends, and the purchase decision making.

Conclusion:

To gain a targeted results, you have to integrate both. Satisfaction surveys will offer you results – from the person’s point of view, but nothing about to define the problem, and without identifying the problem, you would not be able to figure out the solutions. While the Mystery shopping provides in depth analysis and it will respond to all your queries including "WHY", contrary to satisfaction survey, which will offer only "WHAT".

Mystery shopping is the only choice if your company wants to be sure that every regional outlet is following company-wide compliance, while focusing on strengths and rectifying weaknesses in specified areas. If you would like to determine the sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction about your company, directly from your customers, customer satisfaction surveys will do the job for you. Blending the results from both techniques will give you a more complete picture of the experience, as well as an offering a clear direction of action to make it better.