How mystery shopping and instant feedback work together to create qualitative and quantitative customer satisfaction insights

With Gartner reporting that over 80% of organizations expect to compete mainly based on Customer Experience, PwC finding that consumers will pay a 16% price premium for a great customer experience and 97% of consumers telling Forbes that customer service is crucial for brand loyalty, having the right tools to ensure that great experience is absolutely critical to the survival of many businesses.

The importance of an outstanding customer experience is beyond question, yet there is still plenty of debate around the best approaches to help deliver it. In this article we’re going to look at the relative strengths of two ways in which companies are addressing this strategy – mystery shopping and instant feedback – before then considering how they can complement each other to deliver far more value together than apart.

Mystery Shopping

The history of mystery shopping can be traced back to 1940s America, where a company named Willmark started sending private investigators into banks, not to gauge customer satisfaction but to monitor the honesty and integrity of employees handling often large amounts of cash. While compliance checks remain an important part of the mystery shopping process to this day, Willmark and many other brands spotted an opportunity to use a similar approach to gauge customer satisfaction as well.

So, what is the value of mystery shopping today? If you were forced to summarize it briefly, it would have to be the ability to consistently capture deep, high quality, qualitative insights. Not only is the customer experience critical to securing a new customer’s business, PwC also found that 32% of customers stop doing business with a brand they love after a single bad experience, so consistent quality is key.

Businesses invest significant time and resources to develop processes and training for their employees to follow, but it can be difficult for them to see how these translate into practice: are the processes achieving great CX? Are staff so focused on processes that they’re forgetting to put the individual customer at the heart of what they do? Is this method leading to delighted, loyal customers?

By using a well-trained team of mystery shoppers who follow a specific scenario to measure and record their customer experience from start to finish, the business gets consistent feedback across their chosen channel(s), which can reduce some of the risks inherent in having to subjectively assess other forms of feedback, for example email surveys completed by customers some time after their experience.

Additionally, when faced with negative feedback they do not need to second-guess where the process may have failed, as the mystery shopper will diligently record the entire process. This lets the business accurately compare performance across locations, departments and team members.

Another area in which mystery shopping can help to ensure consistency is in the offering of promotions or additional services. For example, a customer may be happy with the service they received when they complete their transaction and leave the store, only to discover later that the employee they dealt with failed to inform them that there was a special offer on accessories purchased at the same time. Not only was additional sales revenue potentially left on the table, but the customer may become actively unhappy with the brand should they find out later that they missed out. Mystery shopping can pick up on this as the mystery shopper knows to look out for it, whereas real customers cannot complain about something if they don’t know at the time that they’ve missed out on it.

Mystery shoppers are brilliant at helping businesses get an objective understanding of how well their staff are delivering the customer experience! However, there are further methods of enhancing the customer experience; instant feedback can provide an alternate means of understanding retail performance and customer needs.

Instant Feedback

The birth of instant feedback happened rather more recently than that of mystery shopping, and at HappyOrNot we know more than most about the story, as we wrote the very first chapter back in 2009 in Finland.  The superpower of instant feedback solutions is the ability to collect huge amounts of customer feedback extremely quickly, get it analyzed in real-time and deliver insights that can be acted on immediately. 

As consumers, we are used to receiving surveys asking us to rate the service we received after just about every transaction we complete.  We may occasionally respond if we had a particularly good or bad experience, but research from The Rockefeller University for Clinical and Translational Science found the longer a survey is, the less reliable it becomes.  By providing the opportunity for customers to leave immediate feedback, those response rates climb beyond recognition, and feedback is captured across the full range of experiences, rather than just those at the extremes, making results far more statistically significant and comparisons from one location or touchpoint to another much more accurate. 

Beyond the increase in customer sentiment captured due to the quick and easy nature in which  feedback can be given, in-moment survey kiosks present another significant opportunity to capture customer feedback in an area which is typically unobtainable – potential customers who leave without completing a transaction.  It’s famously difficult to send a post-sale survey to anyone when a sale has not taken place and you have no contact details, but arguably these are the people from whom you most want feedback.  Because leaving feedback is so easy and instant, significant numbers of non-customers will leave their feedback as well. 

 By striking the right balance between keeping the process quick but still asking just a couple of questions, we optimize the volume of feedback received while gaining insight into the causes of fluctuations in customer satisfaction levels.  Through the use of AI-powered technology , these feedback kiosks can also automatically capture the demographic data of customers when leaving feedback, meaning that no additional effort or information is required from customers. This provides businesses with quality-controlled, reliable data based on customers’ experiences. 

Furthermore, the ability to pinpoint the time and location of the customer experience at the point of capture, when combined with data from other sources – from stock availability, staffing levels and more – allows businesses to normalize their customer satisfaction even when external factors beyond their control are at play.

Benefits of a combined approach

So far, we’ve looked at how Mystery Shopping and Instant Feedback can be used individually to measure the customer experience through very different approaches, but what happens if we combine the two approaches? While mystery shopping is extremely powerful, it does take time and money to train professional mystery shoppers and have them carry out their visits. To get the best out of a mystery shopping budget, it is important to know where to focus your effort.

Instant feedback, on the other hand, allows businesses to collect large volumes of feedback for pennies to show precisely when, where, and why customer satisfaction is falling but it is of course not designed to provide the highly in-depth qualitative analysis of a mystery shopper.

When used together, however, they complement each other for even greater impact, for example:

• If instant feedback shows that a particular store has a regular dip in customer satisfaction on Thursday mornings and Saturday afternoons, you’ve discovered the ideal time to send a mystery shopper in to unearth the detailed causes. Equally, if instant feedback shows that a location is scoring particularly poorly with women in their thirties or men in their fifties, that could influence the demographic profile of the mystery shopper sent.
• If some locations’ customer satisfaction scores regularly perform better or worse than average, this allows businesses to tailor their mystery shopping schedule. For example, scheduling more visits to low performers but less visits to the strong performers, meaning you can achieve greater results for the same budget. This may be of particular benefit in segments that might make it harder to assemble mystery shoppers, for example, where very narrow demographics are required, or specific skillsets.
• Mystery shopping will identify where the customer experience being delivered diverges from corporate standards. The addition of instant feedback helps to assess the impact of that divergence, allowing businesses to objectively determine whether they need to bring staff back into line with those corporate standards or – if the location has higher than average customer satisfaction scores – whether it may be better to adopt their diverging approach into a new corporate standard.

In conclusion, whilst Mystery Shopping and Instant Feedback gather insight into the customer journey in very different ways, those very differences allow these two approaches to complement each other perfectly, delivering a depth and breadth of insight that offers businesses an unparalleled ability to enhance their customers’ experiences, increase satisfaction and grow their businesses.