Mystery Shopping Case Study

A local business has a shop in a prominent position with lots of passing traffic.
They also have a website.
They have a well established team.
They have two issues:
1. Sales have slowed right down online on their website.
2. They can't understand why they've had a couple of bad reviews.

After a Mystery Shopping Experience with me, they now know that their website looked very tired and had a lot of out of date information on it. They hadn't updated in a long time, and there were various broken links in there too, which means that Google will favour other sites ahead of theirs. Buttons didn't link to anything, and it was tricky to find what I was looking for.

A lot of the products I would have expected them to sell or at least mention weren't listed at all, which meant I had to call the shop to ask if they sold the items I was looking for .. and that's where problem 2 came in.

Google had the business listed as being open 9-3pm Mon to Sat, so I called at 1.30pm.
No answer, and no way to leave a message.
I went to Facebook to see if I could send a message on there.
Their page hadn't been updated since July.

I called again about an hour later, and the person who answered the call couldn't have been more sharp or unhelpful if they'd tried. I was made to feel stupid for asking if they sold the item I couldn't find online. If I was a real customer I would have given up there and then, and probably have left a bad review myself - it was THAT bad.

The business owner had no idea that any of this was an issue, and to say they were shocked was an understatement. Those issues have now been dealt with and corrected, giving them the best chance of getting back on track, and they were really lovely, and very grateful to be ahead of the problems now.

£125 versus £1000's of pounds of lost customers and bad reviews.

Find out where you're getting things right, and where it could be going wrong: https://www.mcnealmethod.com/mystery-shopping