Customer Experience is becoming an ever-increasingly important aspect of business success for bricks and mortar, online, and brick and click retailers alike. For the high street, the experience now needs to be safe yet innovative; for online brands, the experience should be user friendly and efficient.

People often wonder where the true value lies in Mystery Shopping. And the answer lies in the blend of insight it offers between asking real customers what they think, and asking customer experience experts how well you are performing.

A lot of people love shopping! So what if you could get paid to shop? Sounds like the perfect job, right?

Well, working as a secret shopper means you can do exactly that, but it's much more than just shopping. It's a skilled process that delivers actionable insight for a business to improve upon.

Is there really a secret? It really depends upon the way you look at it.

Very few know that up to 500,000 people in the UK are registered as Secret Shoppers, (or Mystery Shoppers as they are known), but in reality less than 10% of those are regularly dedicated to the task. So it can be regarded as a specialist field.

On the other hand, Mystery Shopping does exactly what it says on the tin. And the clue of course is in the name. A shopping assessment of a service is carried out by an unknown person, measured against precise criteria. The specific instance is the only secret. And there's a lot of planning, preparation and skill in getting it right.

Mystery shopping is an highly valuable tool used by thousands of the best B2C & B2B businesses across the UK. And all those businesses have one thing in common. They understand that by investing in understanding and delivering an exceptional customer experience, they will be closer to achieving their business goals.

MIND THE GAP

Being COVID compliant is essential to bringing customers back with confidence. Every UK business needs to consider how they intend to be perceived by customers in the critical months ahead.

In truth, Travel is just one of the sectors we work with at Yomdel, helping clients understand the customer experience they deliver. And right now, just like in Travel, many sectors are experiencing a shortage of customers, due to enforced closures, ongoing restrictions and enormous uncertainty in the minds of those customers.

Well, when customers are scarce, no business can afford to see them go elsewhere for want of better service.

Are your response times leaving customers feeling disappointed?

Now more than ever you need to monitor your staff’s performance and ensure leads are not being left unattended. At best they will go elsewhere; at worst they will go elsewhere AND tell everyone how disappointing your customer service was.

When customer experiences change rapidly, to meet enforced circumstances, there's often no measurement and no way of benchmarking success. We've recently worked with property clients who moved quickly to mystery shop their new virtual services.