How Do Companies Use Reports To Their Advantage?

Here are a few ways companies use the information provided in your reports:

• Establishing Measurable Evaluation Criteria with Specific Questions
This creates as accurate an assessment as possible. If you are shopping a store, for example, you can monitor every aspect of the experience, from merchandising and signage to temperature, background music, even the length of time it takes to be greeted by a sales representative.

• Testing Their Training Effectiveness
Shopping a promotional event like a giveaway provides an excellent opportunity to test the effectiveness of company training programs at all levels – and the results may surprise the storeowner. While it is easy to assume employees are following brand guidelines and complying with promotional guidelines, mystery shopping is really the only way to find out – and to use the results to create additional training or compliance incentives.

• Establishing a Benchmark
The results of a company’s brand shopping program are used to initiate immediate improvements in promotional and brand compliance, employee behavior and training. The same criteria and results are utilized to establish a clear set of performance and compliance benchmarks and improvement objectives against which future store shops and similar events can be measured. Likewise, data from multiple mystery shops identify trends to establish directions for large-scale improvements.

• What Gets Measured Gets Done
The basic reason for mystery shopping is simple: If the store knows which areas need improving, and which areas are working well, they can implement specifically targeted training and incentive programs – and, of course, ensure that promotional dollars really are generating value. So in turn, what gets measured gets done.