• Objective, Controlled Data Capture
  • Detailed and Focused on What Matters to You
  • Anonymous and Authentic
  • Perfect for Comparison with Competitors
  • Audio and Video Shops Also Available

Are the parking lot, front end and rest rooms clean and providing a good impression? Are customers being greeted upon entry, and with a genuine smile? Are your policies and procedures being implemented in the manner that you have trained your employees to do so? What does the on-site experience look like from the perspective of an average shopper? Are your sales and customer service protocols being put in place effectively? Is the ideal sales environment being created that you have worked hard to create and trained your employees for? What is the experience like for a customer when you are not there to supervise?

What is Mystery Shopping?

On-site Mystery Shopping is the perfect tool to obtain an honest, objective assessment of the overall operation of each one of your locations.

This methodology incorporates the use of our 200,000+ trained “shoppers” who anonymously enter your locations and follow the observation and interaction guidelines that you compose in consultation with our experienced staff. Posing as ordinary customers, and maintaining anonymity at all times, our shoppers discreetly take note of the variables important to you as the client, and enter the data on-line immediately after collection. After going through a two-step quality control process, the results are then published to our exclusive ShopMAX(R) system and made available to your designated and approved executives.

Mystery shopping is about collecting unbiased data. It is usually a fairly comprehensive look at your business, captured and articulated from an outside perspective. It is the backbone of any major customer intelligence program.

While mystery shopping provides a static, neutral capture of data from a given point in time, it does not, by nature and definition, provide any subjective impressionistic data. Its results will tell you whether or not the shopper was greeted upon entry, but will not tell you how that greeting made the shopper feel – welcomed, indifferent, valued or processed. However, to gain a complete picture of the experience, Shoppers’ Critique International recommends the addition of Neuro-Economic Profiling to capture not only what happened, but how that experience emotionally impacted the consumer. Is the consumer likely to return often? Are they likely to speak highly of the location or brand in social media as a result of specific observations or interactions experienced as part of the mystery shopping evaluation? You can click on Neuro-Economic Profiling to learn more about this powerful predictive tool.

Mystery shopping is conducted in almost every business line you can think of, including retail, quick service, casual dining, fine dining, automotive, multi-family housing (apartments), new home sales, governmental agencies, sports and entertainment operations and venues, health care facilities, educational institutions (public and private), hospitality, travel/transportation, home services, cooperatives and associations, theme parks and attractions, gaming and many, many others.

Some of America’s most astute brands not only use mystery shopping at their own locations, but also use the same evaluation for a comparison conducted at their competitor’s locations for a true objective snapshot of the strengths and weaknesses of the company versus the competition. This analysis allows management to make reasoned adjustments in operations in order to capture greater market share.

Finally, while many companies prefer simple written and scored electronic reports to assess the operations and experiences of their locations, others want an audio or video recording of the evaluation. In this instance, written and scored electronic reports are still published, but with a link on the results page to open an audio or video player to see and/or hear the shop experience. Audio Mystery Shopping and Video Mystery Shopping is conducted in virtually every industry, but more often in automotive, new home sales, education (admissions, touring, financial aid) and health care.

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