An intro to mystery shopping - The simple tool to help supercharge growth
- Ian Finlay
- Jun 26
- 5 min read
Sometimes a few minutes undercover has more impact than a whole season of tracking and trend-watching. Firebird co-founder Ian Finlay goes back to the basics, and explains why mystery shopping should be part of every management team’s strategic plan.
“Mystery shopping is a brilliantly simple tool that far too few businesses use”
What do Ipswich’s 1982 football squad and the drive to improve business performance have in common? No, it’s not a joke: it’s a different angle to get into the subject of today’s blog…
At school my friend Lee – an Ipswich fan – had the team’s Panini stickers on his wardrobe, and for some reason those obscure player names stayed stuck in my head. Today they resurface whenever I’m mystery shopping. Romeo Zondervan, Mich D’Avray, Trevor Putney, Eric Gates – nobody’s ever heard of them, but it makes me laugh every time.
Mystery shopping has much more to offer than name games, of course. It’s a brilliantly simple tool that, in my experience, far too few businesses use.
“Owners and MDs can be shocked at what mystery shopping reveals. But we can then take strategic action that has a significant impact”
So what difference can mystery shopping actually make? Let’s start with some real-life examples that have supported Firebird clients to grow in their sector (i.e. travel and leisure). None of these teams had used mystery shopping before they joined our network, but all of them saw fast, tangible results.
Client 1 was a specialist in escorted tours worldwide. Posing as their ideal customer (under a name from ’82, naturally) I submitted an online enquiry for any general recommendations from their team. I received none. Moreover: despite being an obvious and easy lead, I later learned my enquiry hadn’t been logged or even added to a database.
Client 2 specialised in bespoke tours of a single region, where it was up against several competitors. When I tried to get hold of a quote for my preferred itinerary, their team wouldn’t send it to me. They were too hell bent on confirming me as a lead before they’d talk pricing.
Client 3 had used an extensive amount of resources to attract more bookings from older travellers. Getting in touch, I posed as two different leads – two players from Ipswich Town – one a recent widower and the other a nervous divorcee. Both personas sought specific recommendations and essentially wanted hand-holding; both were simply told to visit the website to find more details.
While Client 4 offered tailor-made tours in the UK as part of its product range. Again matching their target demographic, I created a persona to ask about booking a specific trip on dates that could be flexible, requesting to stay in a certain town and book tables at certain restaurants. Two interesting things came out of that enquiry. Firstly, the agent who replied said “No” to these requests. Secondly, I was pushed towards making a booking the following year – despite there being plenty of availability left in the year I made contact. That push, had I been a real customer, would have meant revenue not coming in for twelve months.
In all of these cases the owners and MDs we worked with were shocked (and not a little frustrated) to hear what mystery shopping had revealed. But in all of these cases we were then able to take strategic action that had a significant, positive impact on the business.
“We do mystery shopping on an ongoing basis as a temperature check”
What these case studies demonstrate is the basic but fundamental point of mystery shopping: to quickly learn whether what you think is happening is actually happening – and identify what needs to be done to bridge the gaps. That might be an urgent team meeting; updated sales training (or retraining); a change in process to how leads are logged and followed-up; perhaps even a change in staff roles.
The process can also be extremely useful if you’re working towards an exit. It’s very rare that a private equity house would get involved in a sale without doing their own mystery shopping, for instance.
Crucially, this isn’t a one-time-only thing. Mystery shopping is something we at Firebird do on an ongoing basis for clients as a temperature check. It tells us whether changes we have agreed at board level have filtered through to the customer experience. (It also tells us how clients are performing in the wider market, whenever we do a comparative mystery shop across competitors.)
Another thing mystery shopping can do is help dramatically cut down waste in budget spend. How? The fact is that leads and enquiries are hard to come by; typically they cost money to bring in. However, if marketing teams are sweating blood and tears to generate new leads and these aren’t being dealt with properly when they materialise, companies are essentially burning money.
Across the Firebird client base, the average conversion rate from lead to booking is around 30%. The fastest and most efficient way to grow any of those businesses isn’t to spend more on marketing to drive more enquiries: it’s to improve that conversion rate. Yet most businesses in the travel sector never think about that; in fact it’s rare for tour operators to even measure conversions – and those who currently do so may not be doing it accurately. Again, mystery shopping can shed light on what’s really going on.
“Having an external partner to support you can add an extra layer of accountability”
If you’re an MD or owner working in travel, the likelihood is that you won’t be using mystery shopping at the moment. What is highly likely is that you’re interested in continuous improvement across every part of your business; in taking that conversion rate up to 40% and beyond; in keeping your rate in higher figures for the long-term.
While any board can embed mystery shopping into their annual processes at any time, we know that having an external partner like Firebird adds an extra layer of accountability: the prompts and reminders your team needs to check in and track real-time customer experiences.
Either way, once you start you’ll find it a highly cost-effective tool to home in on what’s working and what isn’t – all while making the most of Team Ipswich (or its nearest equivalent…)! Can you afford not to give it a try?
Ian Finlay is co-founder of the Firebird Partnership, and has spent the last 30 years in the travel, leisure and education space: a career encompassing inbound operations, language schools, activity centres, hotels, bars and restaurants, and outbound tour operating.
Learn about Firebird and get in touch at www.firebirdpartnership.com
*
Also by Ian Finlay:
Comments