Mystery Shopping is the art of evaluating customer services discreetly and professionally. It is a market research tool used externally by companies to measure quality of service, or compliance with regulation, or to gather specific information about their products and services. Whenever there is an interaction between a customer and sales staff, there is an opportunity for Mystery Shopping. The reason it is called Mystery Shopping is because our auditors are required to carry out evaluations in a discreet manner.
Total Solutions Group, a leading player in Mystery Shopping began its journey in 2003 as the pioneer of Mystery Shopping in India and to become one of the largest and most dynamic providers of customer experience mapping solutions in India and the South-
East Asian countries. TSG now has 32 offices pan-India with over 4000+ certified and trained mystery shoppers. As the name states, Total Solutions Group (TSG) does not consider itself as a service provider, but as a solutions provider.
According to industry estimates, Mystery shopping is around Rs 835 crore business in India by annual revenue and growing at a yearly clip of 30-40 per cent. Total Solutions Group commands the numero uno position
in the Industry over the past many years and has been growing at 60 per cent year on year. Mystery Auditing is a key business solution for F&B, hospitality, retail,
automotive, luxury etc. The purpose of a Mystery Audit is to provide a true and unbiased account of the customer experience. Total Solutions Group has deployed Mystery Shopping programs with many leading Indian and international brands.
Why Mystery Shopping
1. Evaluating adherence to standard operating procedures
2. Identifying revenue leakage opportunities
3. Identifying whether the inventory/ VM planogram is inline with the company policy and that no unauthorised/ outside products are available.
4. Ensuring that employeeintegrity is of the highest level to reduce revenue leakage and self-cannibalisation in the company
5. Measuring and monitoring customer experience on a regular basis
Total Solutions Group’s auditors are thoroughly trained and tested on the Standard operating procedures (Sops) of the client as well as the Mystery Audit checklist. The auditors are geo-tagged to ensure that the auditor spends enough time in the outlet so as to gain complete insights on each item of the checklist. In order to maximise the effectiveness and efficiency of the audits, TSG has developed an application that is installed on the auditor’s mobile device. The application has the entire checklist where the auditor can fill in the report immediately after the audit as well as upload the media proofs. The completed report is then uploaded directly to TSG’s servers within a few hours. A full quality check is completed on the report by the Quality Check team, and within 48 hours of the audit, the client will have access to the report on their unique customised logins to TSG’s client portal.
Optimization through Mystery Shopping
• A full dashboard of analytics and trends analysis,
• Training needs analysis,
• Highlighted concern areas by location
• TSG also has an automated SMS trigger which in case of SoS or fatal issue has been identified for immediate action on the issues highlighted.
How does it help Organizations
• Tracking franchise performance
• In-store marketing
• Evaluating customer experience from the eyes of a customer
• Increase in sales
• Knowing the areas of improvement
• Ensuring adequate training
• Staff incentives and appraisals
• Third party auditors- Real time data, Better acceptability of findings
• Ensuring and Maintaining consistency in services
• Better customer retention
• Less complaints
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