PowerReviews Launches Journey IQ™, the Industry’s First Scalable Mystery Shopping Solution
CHICAGO – March 11, 2019 – PowerReviews, a technology leader enabling connected commerce for leading brands around the world, today announced the acquisition of Stella Pulse, a technology from StellaService that will transform traditional mystery shopping. This new solution, called Journey IQ™, is based on a decade of experience working with mystery shopping clients seeking a smarter, more scalable solution. Journey IQ enables companies to recruit their own customers as mystery shoppers and delivers more representative and actionable insights at scale.
Unlike traditional mystery shopping which uses a third-party network of consumers and pays cash for shoppers’ time, Journey IQ rewards already loyal customers with incentives like loyalty points or discounts on future purchases.
With this technology, companies create mystery shops to gain feedback on areas such as the environment, speed of service, employee friendliness and knowledge as well as the overall customer experience, be it online or in-store.
To start, companies select target customers to complete a “mission” by sending invites via SMS or email. Customers view details of the mission along with the incentive and are then guided through the data collection process using any device. The gamified experience provides highly accurate, in-the-moment data captured from a company’s most trusted and valued source — their customers. What’s more, it creates a high level of engagement. So much so, 99% of customers who complete a mission say they would do it again. Journey IQ not only uncovers rich customer experience insights but also drives revenue as nearly half of customers make an unprompted purchase while on a mystery shop.
Once missions are completed, data goes through QA before flowing into a customizable dashboard that enables companies to immediately identify and improve their customer experience.
“Eighty-nine percent of companies compete primarily on customer experience. However, only eight percent of customers believe companies deliver incredible experiences,” said Sara Rossio, SVP of Product at PowerReviews. “This customer experience feedback, along with other authentic content and consumer feedback we collect on our clients’ behalf, will help companies better compete. Deep insights that are more representative and actionable will help brands create better experiences, build better products, market more effectively and ultimately drive more sales.”
Journey IQ solves three key issues facing the traditional mystery shopping model:
- Scale: The traditional model pays cash for individual shops, making it cost prohibitive to collect mystery shopping data at scale. By using incentives to drive existing customers to the location, companies can gather far more data points than they do today.
- Matching demographics: A common challenge facing mystery shopping is finding shoppers who match a company’s specific customer demographic. Journey IQ gets around this by using actual customers. Companies can now use their existing customer database to recruit shoppers that match specific criteria, whether that’s demographics, purchase history or a combination of both. Leveraging actual customers makes the insights truly representative and actionable while also building deeper customer relationships.
- Data limitations: When using third-party shoppers, companies can’t collect insights on the full spectrum of customer use cases. By using actual customers, companies can collect far more granular insights across every possible interaction type. This includes measuring the customer experience from the perspective of first-time purchases versus the most loyal customers.
About PowerReviews
PowerReviews enables connected commerce. By bringing together billions of shoppers with millions of customer advocates and influencers, PowerReviews helps brands leverage the value of authentic content and consumer feedback. The company’s Connected Platform and Open Network enable clients to collect, amplify and analyze user-generated content and feedback to improve customer experiences and make smarter choices that accelerate growth. Learn more at www.powerreviews.com.
