How to Create Effective Mystery Shopping Scenarios for Your Retail Business

If you haven’t heard yet, mystery shopping is a powerful tool that your retail businesses can use to evaluate and improve customer experience.  When you deploy a mystery shopper, it’s like you can secretly evaluate the quality of service, staff behaviour and the overall shopping environment of your business.  With that, you can gain valuable insights into your operations.  Mystery shopping provides you with a unique perspective that can surely help your business identify strengths and areas of improvement.

So what’s a mystery shopper?  A mystery shopper is the one you hire to pose as a regular customer while observing specific aspects of the customer experience.  Like the ones you watch in the movies, they’re like spies that get into your business.  The difference is, they work for you, not for your competition.  These shoppers will be the ones to evaluate your business, from the friendliness of your staff and the cleanliness of your store to the availability of products; you can definitely determine the overall efficiency of your service.  The primary goal here is to provide detailed and unbiased feedback so you can improve accordingly.

So let’s start!  First, you have to carefully think of scenarios, and in order to do that, you have to have clear objectives.  You should have a specific goal that you really want to achieve.  Like, do you want to evaluate customer service, the accuracy of product knowledge, or the cleanliness of your store?  With these, your mystery shopper can focus on them during their visit.

Next, craft a realistic and relevant scenario.  Let’s be realistic.  Effective scenarios should reflect situations that your staff frequently encounter. Don’t just make up a situation that is unlikely to happen in real life.  If you want an accurate assessment, you should tailor your scenarios to reflect real-life customer interactions.  For example, if you’re running a small business, you can simulate common customer queries, returns, or complaints.  This will help you gauge how your staff responds under normal business conditions and whether they adhere to your service standards.

Also, make sure that you have comprehensive coverage.  Meaning, your scenarios should cover a broad range of customer service aspects, from the initial greeting to the final checkout process.  Of course, you wouldn’t want to miss anything, so it’s best to have a scenario that will include interactions with different employees and touchpoints in the store.  For instance, it could involve asking for help with locating an item, making a purchase, or asking for promotions or loyalty programs.  If you have more in mind, you can also do so.

You should also integrate retail-specific situations.  Your mystery shopper can observe how your employees handle peak times, whether they offer upselling or cross-selling, or probably how they engage with customers.  There would be cases when there’s a product shortage or a customer complaint; you can include these to test how well your employees can adapt and solve the problems.

It is also important to consider the market you operate in and leverage local expertise.  For example, if you’re conducting retail mystery shopping in Australia, then you should incorporate local customer expectations and regional shopping habits into your scenarios.  If you want the right feedback, get it from your target audience.

Then, after completing the mystery shopping evaluations, gather the feedback from your mystery shoppers and evaluate how well your team had performed.  Look for patterns in the data, like recurring issues with customer service or product knowledge gaps.  You can use this information to refine your training, policies, and customer experience strategies.

With these steps, you can now create effective mystery shopping scenarios that will surely provide you with valuable insights into your operations.