If you are a retailer, the holiday season is when the rubber meets the road. I’m sure your sales and market share goal has been upped a notch or two this year and you are expected to pull it off no matter what, while keeping costs down, of course. You know that you can only get this done by investing in technology, process, practices, and people. You need to do something real soon since summer holidays are almost here, and you’ll have to “freeze” everything for the holiday season after that.

Before you can get anything done, you first need to make a business case for the investment. One powerful way to do it is to go shopping, i.e. mystery shopping!

As you might know, ‘mystery shopping’ is  where you could “become” a shopper and try to buy things and get service from your business. Do it through all channels—retail store, website, social, mobile, and the contact center. You can then assess how good you are on important sales and service criteria. Here are a couple of examples for your website (the focus of this blog post):

• How easy is it to find something on your website?
• Do you offer intelligent real-time help before, during, and after the sale?
• What is the speed, quality, consistency of answers and continuity of context across channels?
• Are you keeping up with the Joneses (i.e., your direct competitors)?
• How do you stack up with the very best in your industry or others? (Even if you are the best, wouldn’t you want to keep it that way?)

If you are already better than your competition, you can brag and get rewarded with a bigger budget for more innovation. If your business is behind, you will be recognized as someone who is proactive and rewarded with a budget. So what do you have to lose? Go mystery-shopping now!

If you’d rather delegate the no-fun job of going on a shopping spree to us and help you make the business case, please do so. If you have two minutes, read about the results of one of our mystery shopping sprees where we splurged on 175 leading websites in the US.