Questions You Should Ask in Your Retail Mystery Shopping Program

Questions You Should Ask in Your Retail Mystery Shopping Program

At Reality Based Group, we do things a little differently. One way we set ourselves apart is by making sure we and you ask the right questions in your retail mystery shopping program. Make sure you’re asking the right questions from the start by learning about the questions you should be asking during each stage of our closed-loop design. By staying involved in your retail mystery shopping program, you help ensure your program’s success.

Goals and Objectives

It’s time to get honest with your goals and objectives with retail mystery shopping. What are you looking to improve? Customer loyalty and retention? ROI? How about the customer experience you’re delivering overall? Once you have identified your goals, you can start breaking these larger objectives into smaller goals. For instance, if you know employee upselling leads to increased ROI, you can start identifying whether or not employees attempted upselling during a retail mystery shop and follow up with appropriate training and coaching.

Actionable Behaviors

First and foremost, it’s only worth measuring and evaluating a behavior if that behavior is actionable. In other words, if we simply asked a retail mystery shopper if they received a friendly greeting from an employee, we couldn’t count on the data to be reliable. There are a lot of potential different interpretations of what might constitute a friendly greeting. If we’re asking the right questions, we’re immediately thinking about how to break a greeting down into actionable components. So instead of simply asking a retail secret shopper if they received a friendly greeting, we could ask if an employee smiled at them and introduced him or herself by name? These are actionable behaviors that lead straight into training and coaching.

Revenue-Driving Behaviors

In addition to approaching the behaviors you’re measuring with your retail mystery shopping program based upon whether or not they’re actionable, you also need to be asking if the behavior positively correlates to revenue. Our example earlier of employee upselling is a good one. If you know employee upselling can lead to increased average ticket price and thus improve the bottom line, you know this is a behavior you want to be measuring.

Training and Coaching

An important question to ask is how you’re approaching training and coaching. At RBG, we don’t believe retail mystery shopping should be used in a “gotcha” manner, but truly as a learning tool for an entire team. This a great stage in the process and you should be asking if you’re highlighting the right behaviors for change so you see the results you desire. Ask yourself if you are creating clear objectives and procedures for employees to follow so success is within reach.

Let your attitude towards your mystery shopping program be a hands-on one. Don’t simply let your program run on auto-pilot, but make sure it’s working for you by asking the right questions through every step of the process. By asking if you’re measuring actionable, revenue-driving behaviors and identifying which behaviors have the most impact on your success, you can make the most out of your retail mystery shopping program.

Additionally, you always have RBG at your side to help you keep asking the questions that can make or break your retail business.