The pandemic has taught all of us (and is still teaching us) new lessons. Many different service providers have been globally experiencing rough times, especially those relying on F2F visits and physical contact as such. Lockdowns, closed shops, hotels, showrooms and other venues – standard mystery shopping has taken a hit. Agility has never been more topical and diversifying the portfolio of services proved to be if not a MUST than at least a good idea for a brighter, more stable future.

Companies (i.e., our clients) had to react flexibly to the current state of events and measurements. They adjusted their business models, services or even products offered. As they went into the online world, we joined in and shifted our quality checks more towards mystery calling or mystery emailing instead of visiting their premises. Still, a large portion of business was lost.

At Market Vision, we are focusing on innovation, digitalization and diversification of our portfolio. Our clients who use mystery shopping are offered other complementary services, such as monitoring of competitors or VOC projects, which help us approach the improvement of customer service from a different angle. We quickly learned that despite the pandemic and lockdowns, our clients still needed to stay in touch with their customers and find out how their services fit the current expectations.

At Market Vision, we have been providing our tech-based solution feedTRACK for quite some time already. Thus, it is not a new product we developed in the last year or two, but it did help us significantly during the pandemic. While everything closed down and F2F projects were impossible to do (plus being frowned upon and losing their budgets in some cases), feedTRACK experienced a 60% sales growth, in comparison to the previous non-pandemic years, and granted us a steady cash-flow throughout the crisis.

Although the topic of customer experience measurement and customer-centric approach has been on the agenda for a while now, lately it has been literally booming. feedTRACK is a platform that reaches out via email or text messages to the customers immediately after any interaction with the company, asking them to share their experience and satisfaction levels in an online questionnaire.

All communication is visually respecting the company’s brand and our questionnaire is interactively adapting to what type of service/products the customers used and how they are responding to the questions. Customer feedback is then immediately shown in a user-friendly online report allowing the client to have an instant overview of performance of various people, teams or branches. Plus, it is also easy to share the insights within the company, which allows the client to respond in real time to situations that have arisen.

In this way, together with our clients we set up an effective and systematic customer experience program that helps them strengthen customer relationships, continuously assess current satisfaction and needs of the customers, and also ensures that the company's strategic decision-making is data-driven. Herein lies a significant connection to mystery shopping, as the results and customer insights might be an important basis for the reassessment of sales standards. That is the reason why a lot of our clients are using our CX platform together with our mystery shopping services, and in that way gaining the most out of both solutions.

By Veronika Patakova, CX & quality manager at Market Vision