Mystery Shopping

After 12 years selling Mystery Shopping to Corporations in Retail and Hospitality, I understand why the employees and managers at the stores being shopped hated these programs.

A 200 unit chain might pay between $100,000.00 and $200,000.00 dollars per year for a program that provides one site visit per MONTH.
Yes, one visit, that was all they would spend on average. How would you feel being judged on one drop in to your office at random by the CEO of your company?

Lesson 1 - One visit per month is NOT FAIR it does not represent the real experience of thousands of customers over tens of thousand of interactions. As a real window into the world of customer experience, it is very crude.

Who are these people? We often joked about what our corporate clients would think if they met the average shopper. I want to preface this by saying that most good Mystery Shopping companies do their very best to screen and train shoppers, but really, Shoppers average between $5-$11 dollars for a visit that often takes a total of 1-1.5 hours of training, screening, prep, travel and reporting time.

Would you jump at the chance?

We ran studies that estimate that 10 percent of the shoppers were diligent, and that as much as 60 - 70 percent of the information that the rest supplied was of poor quality at best.


In addition to that, they are not customers. What do they know or care about the brand?

Lesson 2 - Listen to the voice of customers and potential customers, yes that includes your competitors customers.

If I were an employee or manager, I would resent it. Big time. And they did.

It was the best we had at the time though.

Today there are better methods, that employees and managers actually enjoy and look forward to.

Really.

Today we get interactive and reach out to customers, browsers and competitors customers in ways that astound operations teams.

Gift Cards: Are Retailers Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth?

“Why are gift card sales growing so fast and how can retailers get the most value to customers while avoiding the pitfalls?” asks Martin Hoffmitz, Vice President, Client Partnering, at BehaviorWorx Inc. “Gift cards are growing fast because they address a customer need – one stop, easy gift buying that takes the ‘letdown’ factor out of gift giving. Customers love the convenience but hate surprises.”


The Trojan Horse of Gift Cards in Retail

Do you remember the story of the Trojan Horse? It was a seemingly insignificant gift that changed the course of a war.

Let’s review: The Greeks could not take the walled city of Troy, and so they decided to build a large wooden horse and gave it to the people of Troy as a tribute. The attacking Greeks pulled back and left behind the gift – a gift filled with enemy soldiers. The people of Troy brought the gift horse into the city, not knowing what was hidden inside. That night, the soldiers came out and defeated the people of Troy.


Strategy and Intelligence Changed the Course of War

Make no mistake: The changing economy and tight spending trends will make 2008 an intensified war for many retailers.

Winning retailers will be thinking strategically, which will allow them to get ahead of the pack.

Take gift cards: They are changing the face of retail. Millions of dollars worth of gift cards sell during the Christmas season. They are then redeemed during Christmas and into January, even February.

This means thousands of new relationships, and a changing selling season. Are retailers reacting to the new trend and the opportunity, or are they getting ahead of the trend and using it to better serve the market?

Our interactions with thousands of customers, as well as their networks of friends and family, indicate that there are five areas for profitable actions:

1. Gift cards are an invitation to a whole new customer base. Since retail customers give gift cards to friends and family, retailers are exposed to a whole new group of potential new customers.

2. Gift card givers are retailers’ “brand ambassadors”. They give preferred gift cards from favourite retailers because they believe in them.

3. Gift card recipients are primed for a first new experience with a retailer. They are open to a WOW experience that will build future preference and loyalty.

4. Gift card recipients are very interested in creative ways to thank the givers. This means that e-cards, bonus points or other forms of positive feedback can strengthen the impact on the buyer (existing customer) and the receiver (potential customer).

5. Gift card recipients want redemption flexibility. There exists an entire industry for buying and selling gift cards because recipients don’t want that particular gift card. Why don’t retailers take advantage of a multi-million dollar marketplace by creating their own exchange opportunities?

Aggressively successful retailers will seize the opportunity provided by gift cards. Instead of trying to storm the walls of an increasingly tough market for 2008, they will use the Gift Card Trojan Horse to slip inside the walls and open the gates to greater market share, while their competitors sleep fitfully, dreaming the dreams that worked so well in 2007.