CyberTekTTC

What is Secret Auditing?

Secret Auditing or a secret consumer is a tool used externally by market research companies, watchdog organizations, or internally by companies themselves to measure quality of service, or compliance with regulation, or to gather specific information about products and services. The mystery consumer's specific identity and purpose is generally not known by the establishment being evaluated. The shoppers perform specific tasks such as purchasing a product, asking questions, registering complaints or behaving in a certain way, and then provide detailed reports or feedback about their experiences.

Secret auditing was standard practice by the early 1940s as a way to measure employee integrity. Tools used for secret shopping assessments range from simple questionnaires to complete audio and video recordings. These kind of shopping can be used in any industry, with the most common venues being retail stores, hotels, movie theaters, restaurants, fast food chains, banks, gas stations, car dealerships, apartments, health clubs and health care facilities. Since 2010, these shopping has become abundant in the medical tourism industry, with healthcare providers and medical facilities using the tool to assess and improve the customer service experience.

How we do it ?

When we take any project, a survey model will be drawn up and agreed to which defines what information and improvement factors the client company wishes to measure. These are then drawn up into survey instruments and assignments that are allocated to members registered with us.

The details and information points shoppers take note of typically include:

• Number of employees in the store on entering
• How long it takes before the member is greeted
• The name of the employees
• Whether or not the greeting is friendly, ideally according to objective measures
• The questions asked by the member to find a suitable product
• The types of products shown
• The sales arguments used by the employee
• Whether or how the employee attempted to close the sale
• Whether the employee suggested any add-on sales
• Whether the employee invited the member to come back to the store
• Cleanliness of store and store associates
• Speed of service
• Compliance with company standards relating to service, store appearance, and grooming/presentation

Members are often given instructions or procedures to make the transaction a typical to make the test of the knowledge and service skills of the employees more stringent or specific to a particular service issue (known as scenarios).

While gathering information, members usually blend in as regular shoppers at the store being evaluated. They may be required to take photographs or measurements, return purchases, or count the number of products, seats, people during the visit. A timer or a stopwatch may be required.

After the visit the member submits the data collected to our company, which reviews and analyzes the information, completing quantitative or qualitative statistical analysis reports on the data for the client company. This allows for a comparison on how the stores or restaurants are doing against previously defined criteria.