Introducing… Mystery Shopper

The Stocklists is very excited to announce the debut of a new Mystery Shopper feature, starting from next month’s issue. This project has been in the works for several months, with extensive planning to ensure it covers a wide range of shops and regions. Each month’s article will cover three shops in one geographic region, with the best-scoring shop earning a full page write-up on its stellar performance.

The goal of the feature is to highlight some of the most impressive retailers around the country and discuss what makes them so successful. It is also, of course, to offer gentle constructive feedback where applicable based on an objective set of criteria. Finally, our goal is to foster dialogue within the industry about what works and what doesn’t, what customers are looking for in 2025 and how retailers can continue to thrive in these undeniably difficult times.

Will our Mystery Shopper visit your shop? There’s only one way to find out…

The centrality of customer experience
To carry out this large-scale project, we’ve partnered with Mystery Shopping experts, ProInsight. ProInsight works with a wide range of businesses across a broad spectrum of sectors, from small independents to large retail chains, as well as gyms, pubs hotels and many more. Its services include mystery shopping, customer feedback surveys, and audits amongst others which provide businesses with a detailed understanding of their customers’ experiences and the areas they can improve.

According to ProInsight, unless you want to perpetuate a race to the bottom, customer experience (or CX) is the single most important thing for brands to focus on in today’s economy of disruptors.
The Institute of Customer Service’s 2023 UKCSI report concluded that even in the face of the cost of living crisis, over a third of customers are happy to pay more for excellent service, far outstripping the proportion who prefer their experiences to be “no-frills”. With mounting evidence highlighting the association between CX and revenue, it’s clear that businesses simply cannot afford to give it anything less than their full attention.

Businesses that continued to prioritise CX during the pandemic dramatically outperformed those who did not; the gap in stock prices between CX leaders and laggards grew to a colossal 66% by the end of 2021 (Qualtrics). Additionally, 78% of customers say that they will go out of their way to do business with a company that offers better customer service.

What’s next?
So obviously customer experience is crucial, especially when business is far from guaranteed, but what can we do about it? That’s where our Mystery Shopper feature comes in. Each month, our partners at ProInsight will visit three shops in a specific region of the country, evaluating each shopper’s experience across a set of consistent, measurable criteria. With their feedback, we can highlight what retailers are excelling in and where they have room to improve. We hope this feature will encourage retailers to put their best foot forward and focus on customer experience, while remaining a fun, light-hearted look at what makes the flooring trade such an enduringly successful one. As always, we welcome feedback on any aspect of the process or finished article, whether your shop was visited or not.

Look forward to the first edition of our Mystery Shopper feature in next month’s issue, where we will be visiting… Cheltenham!