Mystery Shoppers
Mystery Shoppers Description
Mystery shopping is a tool used by retail companies to ensure the quality of the customer experience at their retail outlets or facilities. Typically market research companies are hired to send "mystery shoppers" to play the role of a typical shopper in exchange for goods, services or pay. Mystery shoppers are generally given a well scripted scenario to act out, which might include any of the following: search for an out of stock product, ask questions of store employees, lodge complaints, make purchases, inspect the cleanliness of hotel rooms, taste the food at restaurants and a number of other tasks.
They provide full, detailed reports on the types of responses, how quickly an employee finds a reasonable alternative, amount of time for special services etc. These reports are often consolidated and looked at by management by city, by state, by region and by store - and in some cases the scores received play a role in managements pay or bonuses. Mystery shopping is a quickly growing type of research as it's a good way to ensure that the quality of the customer experience is good and consistent from store to store.
Mystery Shopping Training
There is at least one Mystery Shopping organization that offers several levels of accreditation, although the majority of mystery shoppers have probably not had much formal training outside of the company that they work for.
Mystery Shoppers Pros
- Mystery shopping is a more systematic way to track the quality of service of a company than by relying on letters, phone calls and complaints.
- With a series of well scripted scenarios and grading criteria a great deal of ambiguity can be taken out of the task of measuring service quality - thus giving management a much more credible measure of service quality.
- With a sufficient number of mystery shoppers retail stores may even be able to identify particular individuals that are less service oriented than expected.
- As many retail stores become commodity sales, the ability to separate yourself from the less expensive stores (Walmart) by providing a superior service is a likely place for less price competitive competitors to go.
Mystery Shoppers Cons
- Mystery Shoppers can be somewhat expensive depending on how many scenarios are conducted and how frequently they are done.
- It's a challenge to find a large enough group of quality mystery shoppers so that the staff isn't able to identify them and provide a superior service to them, knowing that they will receive a report card on the interaction.
- The critical link in mystery shopping is understanding what portions of the service quality is most critical in determining customer loyalty.
