Today we are getting back to exploring mystery shopping trends for 2023. Today on our agenda is an unexpected turn of events – engaging mystery shoppers into learning their consumer behavior. We have noticed that companies started working with them both as subjects and the objects of research.
Continue reading on if you are interested to learn more.
What is consumer behavior?
Consumer behavior determines patterns of customers that drive them to buy or use certain products.
Why do brands need to gather consumer behavior data?
Understanding consumer buying behavior is most important for brands as it helps them to relate better to the expectation of the consumers.
By looking into consumer behavior we can understand the likes and dislikes of consumers and adjust the positioning of the brand, its marketing strategy, and messaging.
Now, back to mystery shoppers, how do they play into this?
We noticed that companies have started to create groups of shoppers with different demographics, occupations, industries, etc, and see how they would react to certain features. In other words, using them as focus groups of sorts.
While they gather information for the typical mystery shopping campaign, the brand also benefits from learning their consumer behavior.
How does it work in practice?
Let’s say a brand has a service, and they are testing a new feature – a chatbot for customer service purposes + additional help from people. They hire mystery shoppers from different age groups and create the same questionnaire.
The whole process is typical of the mystery shopping campaign, but they actively add questions that will allow them to test the waters and see how different age groups would prefer to receive their customer support: using the bot or speaking with people. Or maybe calling instead of testing?
This is a primitive example but hopefully, you now get a better idea of how the process works.
Usually, such research is conducted by big companies that have the resources and budgets to engage more shoppers to study their consumer behavior.
How can it help?
Such an approach allows for killing two birds with one stone.
Conducting the mystery shopping campaign, as usual. Detect flaws in services or products that need to be fixed. Gather information about the liveability and marketability of products. Detect the reasons why consumers might be switching to competitors.
Seeing how different demographics react to certain features. Getting back to the previous example: older people tend to like resolving customer service issues by calling; younger generations tend to use texting and chatting more.
It allows gathering consumer behavior information such as likes and dislikes, behavior patterns that might turn them off from buying your products, etc.
By creating diverse mystery shopper groups and adjusting their questionnaires accordingly, you can collect consumer behavior data and provide your customers with a drastically new approach.
What questions to include in questionnaires?
Depends on the feature/service you are trying to test out. Usually, brands tend to include more open-ended questions to let people express their experiences.
Continuing our previous example, in such a questionnaire, you will probably find questions, like What type of communication would you personally prefer: chat, calling, or bot? Describe why?
Bottom line
Everything described above can be easily explained by the uprising trend of catching every and each opportunity to gather CX data. Today we live in a consumerist world, with thousands of businesses, where everyone has at least a few big competitors. In order to gain and retain consumers brands need to make sure they out-CX their competitors by lot, offering the necessary and more.
This is why when the opportunity presents itself, they take it, collect data and analyze it to later do their best to offer the best product in their niche.
