What is "Mystery Shopping"?

Mystery Shopping is an objective view of your business through the eyes of your customer. A Mystery Shopper visits your business anonymously, posing as a regular customer, to experience and evaluate the level of customer service provided. Mystery shopping provides management with a detailed assessment of employee performance and the variables that affect your customer's experience and satisfaction.

What can Mystery Shopping do for my company?

A well planned and executed mystery shopping program will provide management with a method to measure the current performance of their employees. The detailed feedback from the mystery shopper's visit provides management with an understanding of their staff's areas of strength, while highlighting those areas requiring additional attention or training. Mystery shopping provides decision-makers with actionable information to increase sales, increase profits, improve customer satisfaction and enhance employee performance.

How long does it take to start a Mystery Shopping program?

SCI works closely with clients to develop a mystery shopping program that addresses your company's organizational goals, training objectives and quality initiatives. On the average a new mystery shopping program can be implemented within a couple of weeks after the initial consultation with the client.

Can we use our existing mystery shopper evaluation forms?

Shoppers' Critique International has developed and implemented hundreds of programs for a variety of industries. SCI's experienced designers can custom develop a completely new evaluation form, use your existing mystery shopper forms or suggest ways to improve your current evaluation strategies to target key objectives and areas of concern.

How do you handle my shopping requests?

SCI uses a team of Account Supervisors to handle all of our client requests. Each client is assigned to an Account Supervisor who is responsible for day-to-day client management activities including shopper follow-up, audit and review, and final distribution of the completed mystery shopper and program summary reports. SCI believes this approach to be an essential link in maintaining excellent communications with our clients and to ensure the quality and reliability of our mystery shopping programs.

How are your mystery shopping requests scheduled?

Shoppers are scheduled through our scheduling staff and automated scheduling system. SCI selects only the best qualified mystery shoppers to perform evaluations. Each shopper has a detailed profile in our proprietary database that provides instant access to demographic information, as well as a complete history of their experience and certification level. The performance of every SCI Mystery Shopper is graded after completion of each shop. This ensures that we select only the best qualified mystery shoppers to ensure the quality of the reports.

How does SCI report the results?

The primary vehicle for reporting is through the Shoppers' Critique International Web site. We transfer account management, user login and password administration to our clients so that they are able to maintain 24/7 access to the shopper reports and summary data. SCI programmers provide for multiple levels of password protected access to allow corporate, division, regional and individual store level access as necessary. Efficiencies in technology permit us to narrow the window from time of shop to time it is published online for client access. Online data entry by shoppers provides instant access to the information by our Project Team for review and quality control. Once published, the data is available instantaneously for review by your list of approved users over a secure web browser interface.

Does SCI guarantee shop reports?

All SCI mystery shopping programs come with a 100% satisfaction guarantee. Should you receive a mystery shopper report that was not completed to your specifications or satisfaction, we will replace the evaluation at that location at no additional cost.