Thomas Stemberg, the CEO and founder of Staples, is addicted to
shopping. Despite the fact that he heads an $11 billion store
chain, Stemberg continues to shop the competition in person,
sometimes even enlisting family members to help-including his
mother-in-law, who, he says, "was a regular shopper at Office
Depot's delivery business to help me learn how it
worked."
Shopping the competition is one method of stimulating growth and
innovation for your retail operation. It's easy, do-it-yourself
research that can help you find your marketing edge by monitoring
service from the customer's perspective.
Mystery shopping is an early
warning system for any business that relies on extensive public
contact.
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Getting the most out of competitive store visits means having
clearly defined objectives and knowing what matters most to you and
your customers. A clothing store owner, for example, might shop her
competitors to compare prices, the variety of sizes and styles in
stock, store hours, store clerks' friendliness and the way
customers are greeted. With a good shopping program, you experience
your competitor's store the way customers do, then apply the
best of what you learn to your business.
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Also shop retailers outside your industry. Laura Livers,
president of Shop'n Chek, a mystery shopping firm in Atlanta,
recommends finding a company in a noncompeting field that faces
similar operational challenges, such as handling phone orders and
comparing their tactics and techniques so you can develop ways to
improve yours.
Stemberg suggests small retailers study the tactics used by
leaders outside their industries-"such as the Wal-Mart
greeter," he says-and learn to emulate them.
The other side of shopping-based research takes place in your
own store. Mystery shopping is an early warning system for any
business that relies on extensive public contact. Because poor
service is most often cited as the reason for loss of sales,
consider hiring a mystery shopper to evaluate the experience your
store offers. Professional mystery shoppers go to businesses posing
as ordinary customers and then provide evaluations of their
experiences using written questionnaires and reports.
"A successful mystery shopping program can evaluate and
measure the product knowledge and skills of salespeople," says
Livers, whose company has nearly 30 years' experience and
90,000 shoppers throughout the United States. She says a visit from
a mystery shopper is a "snapshot of time, and the more often
you shop, the more you fill your photo album and start to identify
strengths and weaknesses."
Before starting a mystery shopping program, understand what your
customers want. Suppose you own a store that sells energy-efficient
windows and doors. Mystery shoppers can't help you build sales
over the long term if the product quality is poor, and they
can't tell you what your target market wants from your business
or products. But they can help ensure that people who come in to
shop for windows are waited on promptly and courteously and that
the sales information is presented consistently. "Identify
what the consumer wants and build a training program around meeting
their expectations," says Livers.
For help putting your own mystery shopping program together, go
to www.quirks.com, where you can search more than 250
mystery shopping service providers. You'll also find an
extensive searchable database at the Mystery Shopping Providers
Association Web site.
Contact Kim T. Gordon, author of Bringing Home the
Business, at www.smallbusinessnow.com.
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Originally published in the September 2001 issue of Entrepreneur Magazine