Mystery shopper platform Secret View was founded by Niek Koning in 2015, during his studies in Small Business & Retail Management. As a secondary job, Niek worked in a store where he was confronted with mystery shopping. He was surprised at the poor presentation of the results and the fact that the mystery shoppers often had little affinity with the company he worked for. He saw room for improvement, and thus, Secret View was born.
Secret View aims to help organizations to create an environment where feedback is embraced by everyone. They strongly believe that knowing how to receive and process feedback is vital to improvement. With that in mind, they offer organizations a user-friendly and simple solution to learn from high-quality feedback. For this, Secret View makes use of iDIN, Sign, and WhatsApp Business Platform via CM.com.
“We aim to help organizations to create an environment where feedback is embraced by everyone. Knowing how to receive and process feedback is vital to becoming a better version of yourself.”
Niek explains: “Our clients are mostly large retail organizations, looking for ways to map their customers’ experiences in their stores. They will approach us with challenges and ambitions like supporting training programs, measuring progress in customer experience, increasing in-store conversion rates, and improving evaluation processes, among other things. We strive to establish a long and healthy relationship with our clients. We don’t like to be too formal in our communications. That helps us build a friendly connection with our clients that is focused on making each other better at what we do. A big part of that is listening to our clients’ wishes to find out how we can do better, too.”
Secret View carries out customer experience research and compliance research for large retailers. On a yearly basis, they do tens of thousands of assignments with the 50,000+ community. Reaching out to all of these mystery shoppers can be a challenge.
A challenge to which WhatsApp Business Platform had the solution. The Secret View community actively uses the platform to sign up for assignments and to stay in touch. Invites are sent out to (potential) mystery shoppers for fun assignments in their area that they may have missed, and notifications about new results keep the community informed about ongoing or past projects.
“After sending out an email notification, WhatsApp Business Platform now enables Secret View to send another invite directly to the mystery shopper’s phone. The people that opted in on WhatsApp for Business rated this service as very helpful.”
When looking into solutions to start using WhatsApp Business Platform, multiple suppliers were considered. Secret View had already heard of CM.com through the media and other clients of CM. After comparing multiple user stories and customer cases, CM.com turned out to be the most suitable party.
Another challenge for Secret View is verifying the age of their community members. Additionally, Secret View is legally obliged to let mystery shoppers sign documents in which they agree to certain regulations. As all communication is done digitally, it only made sense to choose a digital solution to sign these documents.
Niek explains the process: “In our compliance research, we have the challenge to actively verify the age of the community members. After the registration, when we’ve verified the mystery shopper’s age, they can start doing mystery shopping assignments.”
As Secret View had already successfully started using WhatsApp Business Platform via CM, they found that CM.com was also able to provide services regarding age verification and the signature of online documents. It was clear to Niek: “Obviously, it was convenient and made total sense to have these solutions hosted with the same supplier, so we expanded our package at CM.com.”
“iDIN is now used once during our registration process, making sure the research is top-notch and clients can rest assured that the compliance research is done by mystery shoppers of the right age.”
Niek is happy with the results: “Approximately 10.000 mystery shoppers have used iDIN for us so far, a number which is also constantly increasing as we expand our market share and the volume of our researches. The essential KPI for us was to verify the age of all mystery shoppers involved in compliance research. Also, we aimed to significantly decrease the time spent doing age verifications (by means of iDIN and other methods). Through consistent use and careful integration we managed to meet both KPIs.”
“With iDIN, we successfully decreased the time spent on age verification and reached our 100% age verification goal for all mystery shoppers”
Besides meeting the KPIs, Secret View is also very satisfied with the implementation of the different tools. Although Secret View clients are not directly exposed to the software or these services, they are now assured of higher research quality and guaranteed legal compliance. The operations team, who are the end-users of the CM.com dashboard, were quickly at ease using the tool and are very positive about the support delivered when required. The tools are very user-friendly. The online dashboard tools are plug & play, and the team found them very easy to get started with and to incorporate into their day-to-day processes.
Niek says: “When, as an organization, starting with new tooling like CM.com it is just a matter of getting every one of our colleagues up and running as soon as possible, also when this means not everything with regard to the onboarding is perfect yet. By letting the end-users in quickly, the best feedback is collected quickly and the remaining questions are being asked and answered right away.”
Looking back, Niek feels that they could have taken a deep dive and started using the tools sooner, despite not having fully onboarded. They could have taken the plunge, as the solutions were so easy to use, straightforward, and do not require much technical knowledge from end-users.
Secret View is still steadily growing its community of mystery shoppers. In the future, they are looking to integrate new identification solutions into their platform.
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