High Finance: Three New Trends in Mystery Shopping

Financial institutions wishing to ensure compliance with new industry regulations are partly responsible for the growth of the mystery shopping industry. As more regulations are implemented, evaluating employee performance is quickly taking a back seat to regulatory compliance as the most important reason for implementing mystery shopping programs. In fact, three new trends seem to be emerging.

1) Online mystery shopping will continue to grow as more customers access financial products and services via the Internet. A secure and easily navigatable web site is crucial. Comprehensive product and service descriptions, and ease of interacting with bank representatives is also vital to ensure the optimum online customer experience.

2) As use of mystery shopping programs grows, there may be some unexpected benefits. For example, professional mystery shoppers sent to evaluate a company’s regulatory compliance may uncover problems in employee behavior or store operations. This allows others departments, such as sales and marketing, to benefit from the mystery shopping program, even though that wasn’t the plan.

3) Expect the number and variety of organizations using mystery shopping programs to increase, as mystery shopping moves from the expected retail sector to financial institutions, health care, and other less traditional organizations.

Today’s savvy financial organizations use mystery shopping to gather competitive intelligence. Federal regulators, third-party suppliers and watchdogs use mystery shopping to verify bank branches are selling their financial products properly. As the pressure of competition increases globally for all kinds of companies, mystery shopping will continue to be the best way to find out what you really need to know to continue to compete.