Mystery Shopping is the practice of using trained shoppers to anonymously evaluate customer service, operations, employee integrity, merchandising, and product quality.

Mystery Shopping goes by many names:

• Secret Shopping
• Mystery Customers
• Spotters
• Anonymous Audits
• Virtual Customers
• Employee Evaluations
• Performance Audits
• Telephone Checks

What Are The Benefits of a Mystery Shopping Program?

• Monitors and measures service performance
• Improves customer retention
• Makes employees aware of what is important in serving customers
• Reinforces positive employee/management actions with incentive-based reward systems
• Provides feedback from front line operations
• Monitors facility conditions – asset protection
• Ensures product/service delivery quality
• Supports promotional programs
• Audits pricing & merchandising compliance
• Allows for competitive analyses
• Compliments marketing research data
• Identifies training needs and sales opportunities
• Educational tool for training & development
• Ensures positive customer relationships on the front line
• Enforces employee integrity

Mystery Shopping Today

• Wide-ranging impact – with shoppers, clients, and providers
  • Many shopper oriented web sites and List Serv’s exist to assist shoppers with education and finding jobs
• Internet provides more reach and exposure for mystery shopping services
• Faster and less expensive shopper recruiting
• Faster and less expensive data collection
• Faster, automated reporting processes
• Increased need for validation of data

Who Provides Mystery Shopping Services?

• Mystery Shopping Specialists
• Marketing Research Firms
• Private Investigators
• Merchandising Companies
• Training Companies
• Advertising/Promotion Agencies
• Others

Mystery Shopping Methods

• In person/on-site shops
• Telephone shops
• E-Commerce web site shops
• Hidden video/audio recording
• Full narrative shops (qualitative)
• Checklist shops (quantitative)
• Purchase & return shops
• Discrimination (matched-pair) testing

Why Use Mystery Shopping?

• When location, pricing, and product assortment are no longer unique, service is often the key to success or failure.
• It costs 10x more to get a new customer than to keep an existing one.
• One unhappy customer will tell 5 other people of their bad experience with services

Why customers leave?

• 69% poor customer service
• 13% poor product quality
• 9% competitive reasons
• 5% other
• 3% move away
• 1% die

“What gets measured, gets done”

The History of Mystery Shopping

• Initially, mystery shopping was a technique used by private investigators to prevent employee theft – primarily at banks and retail stores
• In the 1940’s, Wilmark coined the term “mystery shopping” and began using the method for evaluating customer service
• In the 1970’s and 80’s, Shop ‘n Check popularized mystery shopping by gaining extensive publicity
• In the 1990’s, fueled by the internet, the mystery shopping industry experienced rapid growth and acceptance.
• Into the 2000’s, the creation of software packages such as SASSIE and Prophet have revolutionized the industry

Who Uses Mystery Shopping?

Any business/organization that needs to monitor it’s operations, facilities, product delivery, and services like