What should be included in the Mystery Shopping Checklist?

Mystery Shopping is a market research method that gathers information from the customer's point of view and the actual service conditions throughout. But to achieve this information wasn’t only using an anonymous shopper, but also needed to create a Mystery Shopping Checklist to store data.

What is a Mystery Shopping Checklist?

Mystery Shopping Checklist is a questionnaire that shoppers use to provide information after completing a shop inspection. It has a variety of questions mixed into the same questionnaire. The Mystery Shopping service company will collect and process the data from this questionnaire, summarize all the information and report the results of the examination to the client company.

What questions should the Mystery Shopping Checklist have?

The Mystery Shopping questionnaire used for each company is not always the same. Because each customer comes from a different industry, there are different things to check. Even businesses from the same industry may have different audit requirements or details. But we can summarize the important questionnaire categories, frequently encountered, and should be included in the questionnaire as follows:

• the friendliness and dedication of the staff
• the overall environment of the place
• product placement in the store
• ability to handle customers
• checkout process
• impression or overall experience

What are the details of each category? Let's take a look.

The staff's friendliness and dedication

Businesses usually want to check our service personnel because it is a person who interacts with customers directly. The service quality depends on the staff themselves which is often checked including compliance with the given process, uniform and dress, willingness to work, and friendliness that is conveyed by words, tone of voice, or gestures.

The store environment

The next section that is often required to check is the location of services. Such as cleanliness, store organization, product arrangement, or condition of materials and equipment in the shop. This may include the placement of media to stimulate various sales as well because sometimes the customer company wants to check if each branch has a banner to promote new products that have just been sold or placed in a stand-out spot.

Product placement

In addition to the overall site inspection, product placement checks are also important. Because it affects the sales of the products that are placed. They may check if there is a designated item on the shelf or if the shelf is always full of products. In addition, some customers of the company check the various promotional banners' placement as well.

Ability to handle customers

Sometimes the Mystery Shopping process may require the Shopper to ask questions or report problems to the staff to test the knowledge of the employee or check the readiness to solve immediate problems which are considered an important part of the service.

Checkout process

In this part of the question, many businesses tend to focus on the honesty of their employees. For example, asking if the change was received correctly or not or if the receipt is being delivered. Because employees often have fraudulent behavior in the payment process. But one thing that is often overlooked is checking the process and timing of payments Because it is part that affects customer satisfaction, such as employees taking too long to charge or being unable to pay with the desired payment method, etc.

Impression or overall experience

This section of the question is usually at the end of the questionnaire. It is intended to inquire about your impressions or feelings about the service received from the visit. Note that this section of the question will not be graded. Because it is a subjective question that allows Shoppers to express their feelings freely.

Although this section of the question is not scored. But the information obtained from this section of the question may lead to improvements in service development. Because sometimes you find that the service rating is good, but the Shopper is not impressed with the service they received. Because it lacks something that the shop doesn't have in the review criteria. So this section of the question may be more valuable to you than you might think.

If you are still not sure, Mystery Shopping service companies can provide advice on creating a survey questionnaire. The service standards or questionnaires that you already have can be converted into questionnaires suitable for examination and under your service policy.