The number one problem most businesses face isn’t getting customers to come to their business, it’s retaining those customers once they do come. By providing a constant assessment of how your business is interacting with customers, mystery shopping can increase customer retention dramatically. A misconception about mystery shopping is that the goal is to catch a single bad apple in your staff, but the much larger goal of a successful mystery shopping campaign should be to provide continual feedback about a key part of the customer journey. Mystery shopping can be an excellent way to identify sales and training opportunities and to improve employee performance.

Ensure Employee Integrity

Mystery shopping is the vehicle through which you can provide enforcement of your employee handbook, and there is no reason to think of that in a ‘gotcha’ kind of way. The rules and policies you’ve established are what keep things safe, legal, and fair. Without enforcement, though, they’re meaningless.

Foster Friendly Competition

People — and this includes your employees — thrive on competition, and mystery shopping is an excellent way to create a fun and playful competition between the staff at your different locations. And when implemented as a way to celebrate employee success, friendly employee competition can be a great way to build your business.

Mystery shopping campaigns are only as effective as the attributes they measure. An effective mystery shopping campaign can measure true-or-false statements and will provide frequent enough data to be statistically meaningful — sorry, once every six months is only going to provide a quick snapshot of one moment. Done frequently and implemented correctly, mystery shopping has the power to transform your business and increase revenue.

Knowing the best way to roll out mystery shopping for your business can be overwhelming. A business coach can help take the stress out of the process, and Members of the Association for Entrepreneurship USA get discounts on a broad range of services, including business coaching. Services are available starting at just $1 a day! Gosmallbiz.com offers exclusive discounts to our members, ensuring they’re set for success with services starting at just a dollar a day! To learn more, visit https://afeusa.org/join-afe/membership-benefits/gosmallbiz/.