Market Research

Mystery shopping can take many different forms and be used to identify how your sales approach compares to your key rivals or to understand and streamline your customer journey.

We can help you check the performance of your front-line teams and to identify and track improvements over time.  Mystery shopping provides indisputable evidence as to how employees perform during each transaction with customers. Measuring actual performance against your customer service standards is the concrete way to ensure that standards are maintained and improvement opportunities identified.

Alternatively, mystery shopping can be used as a form of competitor intelligence to help you to uncover and benchmark how your sales process and service attributes sit within the marketplace.

It’s a fact that discerning customers will carefully shop around before committing to spending, so keeping a finger on the pulse of competitor activity can make a lot of sense. We build this essential activity into our new business development and lead generation services, capturing intelligence on which of your rivals is active and in which account.

For more immediate, direct and focused information, you may prefer to carry out competitor benchmarking, where we approach known buyers and ask them to evaluate your proposition, your approach to marketing, or your service delivery against that of your key rivals.

Either way, you get the opportunity to benchmark your offering against those who will also be targeting your customers. Another powerful insight into your competitors’ offerings can be gleaned through win/loss research, which takes an independent look at your recent bid outcomes.

Customer satisfaction research helps your organisation to focus resources more effectively and will provide consistent, robust and comparable data. Your programme can incorporate questions covering service delivery, timeliness, information provision, professionalism, staff attitude and satisfaction with service across a range of services you define.

Your programme will be tailored to help you to drive through improvements to service and to focus your resources on areas where improvements are needed and will be most valued. Our focus is on completing the picture you hold already, providing direct measures of satisfaction only where you lack such information, so you spend money only where you need to.

Using personal telephone interviews and a ‘with permission’ approach not only allows you to target the customers you most want to reach but also creates the most positive impact on your customers, communicating how much you value their business and care about what matters to them. Customers who prefer not to receive a telephone call may participate through an alternative channel of their choice; a face to face interview or online survey, for instance.

Using satisfaction surveys and mystery shopping gives you independent evidence of what is really going on at the sharp end, what needs to be done to improve service and value, and also of what you have achieved over time as your delivery systems evolve.

Communicating with your customers can be costly so it makes sense to ensure you are spending money on the right marketing communications activities. Research here can help you make wiser investments and understand better how customers buy; where they look for your type of offering, which exhibitions and shows they attend, which publications you need to be seen in, how they’d like to interact with you, how you can best influence their opinion and so on. And assuming you take on board the findings, your future communications will have more impact and deliver a better payback.

To enable you to position your product appropriately, and optimise the impact of your planned new product, you will want to understand, in depth, your target buyer’s needs and primary drivers for purchase. You’ll probably also want to make sure you know which features may be of greatest benefit to the target audience, so as to leverage these in your market.  And of course you’ll want to know whether your pricing model will be acceptable or not before you launch.  We have helped many brand name organisations to sound out their markets before launch in order to get their offering shaped right, first time.

You may be tasked with helping to re-brand after a merger, or simply looking at launching a product which is quite different to your usual offering. Or maybe you’ve planned front line systems overhaul which could dramatically impact the service experience, and want to be sure it’s well received. We can help you to find out, before and after if necessary, how your customers feel about your brand, what values they associate with it, and where you need to focus your efforts to maximise goodwill.