Multichannel Mystery & Secret Shopping Services

Centrebound provide a range of different mystery shopping services for businesses across the UK. In an ever-changing marketplace, we help provide unbiased, independent insight that ensures customer experience excellence for your organisation.

 

Today more than ever, customers are provided with opportunities to feedback their experiences. Reviews and ratings provide an easy way to typically praise or complain about the service they receive. Even a quick review of a company’s feedback will highlight the polarisation of opinions that are gathered in this way. Customers tend to make the effort to contact a company when they have experienced something exceptional, be it outstanding or poor service. This feedback is useful and important but can lack constructive and objective content. Carrying out mystery shopping audits of your business ensures you have access to the breadth of objective customer experience that lies between outstanding and poor service.

What is Mystery Shopping?

Mystery shopping is an effective way of getting a real customer experience at the point of purchase or service delivery. Centrebound mystery shopping agents carry out audits in store, over the phone, or online. Mystery shopping agents are provided with specific briefs regarding the mystery shopping audit they are to carry out and they provide detailed reports on the customer experience. Centrebound work closely with our clients to understand their business needs and create a mystery shopping programme to meet their goals.

Having collated the insight from the mystery shopping audits we produce a report for your business with valuable insight that can help identify areas for improvement. Each Centrebound Mystery Shopper programme is configured to the objectives your business is looking to achieve. Your tailored report will give you the insight to measure the success of specific key performance indicators or general business goals. Often mystery shopping programmes are linked to staff performance bonuses and personal development plans. This is an effective way of increasing staff engagement into the concept of the customer experience.

Store & Venue Mystery Shopping

Centrebound’s Mystery shopping programmes are developed in line with your venue or store based KPIs and customer service measures. Our unbiased, independent, store-based mystery shopping surveys and reporting analytics will give you first class insight into your customer facing operations. We work with you to create the mystery shopping audit that meets your objectives. From employee sales processes, communication, compliance, to specific product visibility, store layout, customer objection handling, we can help you discover what is happening on the ground in your stores or venues, and in so doing, help you improve the customer experience.

Additionally, if you have had to change products or services Centrebound can tailor the mystery shopper programme to help you understand whether your initiatives and customer service vision are being delivered in store.

Our store and venue Mystery Shopping services can be rolled out in a variety of different business settings. We cater for supermarkets, DIY/hardware stores, convenience stores and petrol forecourt retailers as well as all sectors of the hospitality industry. We can provide Mystery Shopper feedback from bookmakers and adult gaming centres to assist with gambling legislation compliance, as well as the rapidly emerging market of the home-delivery providers. Find Out More About Our Store Mystery Shopping Services>>

Age Restricted Test Purchase Scheme

Ensuring that your business is complying with the law in the sale of age-restricted goods is vital to businesses that sell these products. At Centrebound we provide Mystery Shopper age restriction test purchase services to verify that employees are carrying out age checks such as Challenge 21, Challenge 25 and Think 25. We already perform over 10,000 age checks and test purchases each year for leading retailers to help prevent sales of age restricted goods such as alcohol, vapes, cigarettes, e-cigarettes, knives, age-restricted DVDs and computer games, energy drinks and solvents.

We can also verify compliance on under-age gambling legislation in bookmakers, adult gaming stores and lottery ticket outlets. As an independent company we provide transparent and impartial data to show you if and where there are improvements to be made. The Test Purchasing Mystery Shopper programme will be bespoke to your business or industry and can be tailored to store, venue or home-delivery services.  Additionally, having an independent report into your compliance procedures shows due diligence to the interested authorities and shareholders. Find Out More About Age Restricted Goods Test Purchasing>>

Covert Video Mystery Shopping

For unparalleled customer insight and compliance work, we provide nationwide covert video mystery shopping services.

Video mystery shopping is becoming an increasingly popular for businesses in different industries. Having a customer experience and staff interaction filmed removes any doubt about what did or did not take place. Video recording also allows businesses to clearly see and understand some of the more subtle nuances of each interaction with a staff member.

As well as helping businesses to literally see the standard of service being delivered to customers and potential customers, video mystery shopping can help them to identify and improve whether appropriate sales opportunities are being consistently pursued and effectively converted, and the levels of operational efficiency.

Video mystery shopping can be used to great effect in any of the industries that commonly use report-based mystery shopping, including retail, hospitality, leisure and tourism, automotive, legal and professional services, property sales and lettings, and more.

Employers are legally required to inform staff if they are going to be filming them (or arranging for them to be filmed) at work.

Naturally, staff members don’t all love the idea of being secretly filmed, so it is important to have an open and frank discussion about the goals and purpose of any mystery shopping programme. Generally, the more of a customer-focused culture exists already, the more open staff members are likely to be to the idea of mystery shopping activity. Find Out More About Covert Video Mystery Shopping>>

Phone Mystery Shopping

Telephone mystery shopping is an effective way of measuring and developing the quality of service delivered by your teams. The insight gained from implementing a telephone mystery shopping programme can enable you to identify and implement change based on your customer’s experiences.

Results are produced on assessment forms with scores for every individual call with fully definable aggregate reporting. These are provided along with an MP3 recording of the calls. Find Out More About Telephone Mystery Shopping>>

Online Mystery Shopping

When many people think of mystery shopping, they typically think of in-store secret shoppers, where items are normally purchased in person from bricks and mortar retail stores. Of course, it is a very useful tool, but online mystery shopping is also important too.

Our expert online mystery shopping services include.

• Placing online orders
• Contacting e-mail and webchat
• Social media interaction

Bespoke online business surveys can cover all aspects of the customer experience. This includes the initial impression of your homepage, ease of browsing and selection right through to placing an order and after-sales services. Find Out More About Online Mystery Shopping>>

Mystery Manager

Mystery Manager is an approach from Centrebound that puts selected Centrebound Agents into your organisation to be the eyes and ears of the head office or management team. Playing the role of a customer or member of the public, Centrebound Agents will be able to report back, location by location on whether the things that are important to you are getting through to the market.

Each Agent will be fully briefed on exactly what you as a management team are looking for. Additional telephone or face to face training can be included in the Mystery Manager programme so you can be confident that our Agents are 100% aligned to your company goals. More About Our Mystery Manager Program>>

Contact us to discuss how we can help you achieve your business goals with our expert mystery shopping services.