The Importance of Mystery Shopping for Your Business

Doing business in Vietnam requires mystery shopping from time to time. Learn how mystery shopping can give you valuable insight into the customer journey and internal processes of your company.

Mystery shopping is a type of market research done in which a trained “mystery shopper” poses as a potential customer interested in your services, or those of your competitor. They then analyze the entire customer journey, from initial contact to delivery of goods or services, analyzing the quality of consultation, delivery, and overall customer experience. 

Through external mystery shopping, businesses have an overview of what their competitors are doing and use this to benchmark their own customer experience and satisfaction. With that, businesses are always one step ahead of their competitors, allowing them to promote their brands more effectively and increase sales.

A mystery shopping service can be customized based on a company’s business requirements. Things that can be assessed and measured through mystery shopping can range from employee friendliness to persuasive skills, store decoration to the delivery experience.

Mystery shoppers are highly sought after in Vietnam because it enables businesses to gain unbiased customer feedback and get better at what they do. This is an especially valuable service for new customers looking to enter the market and do basic market research. 

Here are more reasons mystery shopping in Vietnam is of significant importance in this booming economy.

External vs Internal Mystery Shopping

Mystery shopping is generally done with two purposes in mind: 1. to conduct an internal audit of your sales and delivery teams, and 2. to conduct research on your competitors. 

Internal Mystery Shopping

This is the process of analyzing your sales & delivery pipeline and analyzing your services, from the point of sales, customer experience, and customer service from an objective perspective

External Mystery Shopping

As can be deduced from the title, the process of external mystery shopping involves competitor analysis. This means carrying out a similar audit, as the internal method but on your competitors. This allows you to benchmark your own processes vs your competitors and will allow you to iterate and improve your own sales and delivery pipelines. 

Benefits of Mystery Shopping for Businesses in Vietnam:

Vietnam is a young, dynamic market whose economy is a relatively new one in the context of globalization. It has recently become an important player, especially as a key manufacturing and supply chain hub, benefiting from the pivot away from China. Furthermore, it has (recently) become host to a fast-growing middle class that is enthusiastic about consuming new products from around the world. But it’s not an easy market to understand, and doing your market research is key to your expansion success. Here are the benefits of mystery shopping in Vietnam.

1. It Tells You About the Employee’s Performance

Mystery shopping is a good way to evaluate the performance of your employees and how they treat their customers. The results of the evaluation can be used to provide the required training to the company’s employees.

Customer experience and customer service are not seen the same way as in the west. If your company’s customers are based in Europe and the US making your team transition its mindset to a more “western” one is not easy and therefore has to be checked. 

2. It Discloses How Satisfied Your Customers Are

For a business to be successful, you need to know how your customers think and feel from the very beginning when they first set foot in your store to the end when they pay for their products or services.

Mystery shopping in Vietnam creates an unbiased view of your processes, enabling a professional mystery shopper to interact anonymously with your team to gain true, valuable insights about the service quality, determining the customer experience and satisfaction.

3. You Know Your Competitors

Ever wonder why your competitors are outperforming you in certain areas? Find out exactly what they are excelling at, especially when you look at the customer journey, and use that information to tweak your own customer journey.

Therefore, knowing your competitors well endows you with the opportunities to implement strategy effectively to improve your business performance and always be ahead of your competitors.

4. You can Improve the Buying Process

Another perk of engaging in mystery shopping is that a mystery shopper can help review the buying process at the point of sale. The review you later get from them will help you decide which step of the buying process you should adjust or put extra effort into to increase the customer buying experience.

Final Words

As an emerging market with underdeveloped infrastructure and education, your local employees will not be serving your customers on the level that you probably hope, in terms of “western standards”. However with a robust training program, anything can be achieved, just don’t forget to measure the results and implementation of that training.